Save the Green Planet!

Byeong-gu kidnaps the head of a chemical company and ties him up in a cellar. His claim: the man is an alien from Andromeda, and if he can be made to confess before the lunar eclipse the world will be saved. His girlfriend, a tightrope walker, helps him. A detective looking for the missing man works his way in from another direction. The subject is not the conspiracy but madness and being right occupying the same man. Byeong-gu's mother was poisoned working in a factory and his father died in a mine; the alien theory is nonsense, but the cause of the rage that produced it is real. The film keeps the viewer unsure for a long time which side they are on. The form recognises no genre: a torture sequence, cartoon interludes, black comedy and a full science-fiction passage near the end all in one film. The tonal shifts are abrupt and deliberately mismatched. It collapsed at the Korean box office. Jang Joon-hwan later spoke openly about watching it fail, and did not make another film for a decade. Today it is counted among Korean cinema's cult works. Yorgos Lanthimos made an English-language remake, Bugonia, in 2025. Shin Ha-kyun leads and Baek Yoon-sik plays the captive. Who it is for: viewers who like genre-mixing films that make no attempt at a consistent tone. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take torture scenes; the film stays in them a long while.