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It’s a dark comedy! It’s torture porn! It’s sci-fi! For two beautiful minutes it’s a Hong Kong action film complete with a wire fu fight scene! It’s apocalyptic horror! It’s a police procedural thriller! It’s a class critique! Why is it making me cry!

Save the Green Planet! is unlike any other movie I’ve watched (and I did watch Bugonia). There’s never a single moment to breathe or adjust your expectations before the story twists in a new, bonkers direction, and all you can really do is laugh or cringe or watch in mute horror or, perhaps most bafflingly, ache.

The first time I watched, Byeonggu’s bees felt more like an underutilized symbol for… perhaps climate change (and maybe one of the only details I thought Lanthimos’s remake leveraged to a greater degree)? But I think was distracted by the dark humor of the main bee scene, and that led me to overlook the other obvious interpretation of the bees. There’s something more there. Maybe… Or maybe I’m reaching, but whatever, reaching is fun.

There is, of course, the clear reading of this particular scene. Immediately after this exchange, the shin bone falls out of Detective Chu’s backpack, and Byeonggu is staggered by the realization that Detective Chu is “just the same. Just like all the others.” Detective Chu’s kindness the night before, the moment where they related over a shared sense of suffering, all of it was a trick in order to capture him. Byeonggu is a bee and Chu the deceitful keeper.

But in a larger sense, the bees are meant to symbolize the factory workers right? Industrious, hierarchical, numerous, etc. And all of them under the power of one man. Byeonggu sees himself as a benevolent keeper because he relates to the bees. He’s been the little guy all his life, vulnerable and exploited, but in the end, his “I would never do that” is a lie he tells himself just like the existence of the Andromedians. Because he does trick them. He throws the honey onto Chu and agitates the bees so that they kill him.

The movie lingers on shots of two bees that Chu shoots down before he’s swarmed, and I can’t help but think of Byeonggu’s unnamed girlfriend, killed during the factory strike, and his mother, catatonic in a hospital bed thanks to the factory’s poor safety regulations.