South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin has spent the better part of a decade away from the limelight after his last film, The Wailing, stupefied audiences with its audacious horror thrills and even more audacious 156-minute runtime. So naturally, his big return this year is a 156-minute alien invasion blockbuster featuring wanton destruction, chainsaw autopsies, diarrhea monologues, gorgeously shot horseback chases, grotesque alien creatures and enough slow-motion action to fill a Michael Bay movie.
There was never any way that Hope was going to be a normal, run-of-the-mill movie no matter what it ended up being about, but even knowing that going in does little to prepare you for just how completely batty this thing becomes.
The film initially plays like an enticingly large-scale monster mystery. In the town of Hope Harbor, located near the DMZ, police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) investigates a series of gruesome deaths after a mutilated animal is discovered in the road. Nobody knows what could have done this, with the possibility of some enormous predator akin to a tiger slowly giving way to something considerably more supernatural. Na wisely spends a solid amount of time withholding the creature itself, allowing the aftermath of its destruction to do the heavy lifting as Bum-seok trails behind it. Bodies are torn apart in impossible ways, buildings are demolished and vehicles are tossed around, but the monster remains just out of sight for just long enough. It’s classic movie magic.
There is an almost Spielbergian style patience to this early stretch, with Na and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite, Burning) repeatedly framing the gorgeous landscapes of the town, forests and mountain roads against the increasingly horrific evidence of something enormous and violent tearing through them. The mystery is allowed to breathe before Hope eventually busts open the doors and reveals the monsters in all their dementedly bizarre glory. This is where things get a little more complicated.
The creatures themselves are wonderfully strange and scary, particularly in the ways they move, but the CGI is undeniably uneven. They can look genuinely intimidating or fittingly uncanny one moment and like unfinished video game graphics the next. Considering how much of the movie eventually depends on these completely digital characters, that can be a significant problem. Na has said that the creatures were deliberately designed to retain some mystery in their off-putting presentation, but the film ultimately asks you to accept a fairly substantial amount of artificiality. For some, that can be an easy dealbreaker.
As for myself, I can’t exactly hold that issue against Hope too much. First off, creating convincing, entirely digital creations and characters with significant screen time like these is an incredibly tall order for anyone not named Wētā FX. Second, it’s simply awesome to watch Na Hong-jin, the filmmaker who came to prominence with dour crime epics like The Chaser and The Yellow Sea, completely go for broke with what is easily one of the most unhinged, tone-shifting blockbusters imaginable. Hope borrows liberally from various sci-fi, creature features and action cinema around the world, but filters all of it through the sensibilities of Na’s unique brand of Korean extremity.
The result is an unwieldy but thoroughly thrilling ride that flows between grand action set pieces, hilariously gross gags and situational humor, and jump-out-of-your-seat frights packed with a colorful cast of memorable characters. There’s the badass rookie cop Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) who makes one of the coolest movie entrances ever, local wildlife tracker Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) who goes from heroic one minute to complete punching bag / ragdoll the next, and the strange, seedy Yang-bae (Eum Moon-suk) who may be the one to have made first contact with the creatures. Ho-yeon is particularly great here. With a commanding screen presence, she throws herself into the firearms, driving and stunt work with an elegantly steady physicality that makes her one of the film’s most consistently entertaining presences.
The same goes for Bum-seok’s partnership with retired colonel Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee); their mismatched buddy routine provides some of the movie’s funniest moments as the two attempt to survive and make sense of the chaos. One elderly survivor’s (a movie-stealing Im Hyun-sik) extended, disgusting testimony about what he witnessed out in the woods is the sort of meaningfully silly yet still important midway shift that should not work nearly as well as it does. And somehow, Hope keeps finding room for more.
Car chases combine with horseback chases, gunfire erupts with thunderously crisp sound design, human blood and alien guts explode across the frame in equal measure, spaceships tumble out of the sky, and then it’s time for even more chases with even more slow-motion action beats. Na clearly has an almost pathological drive to keep the movie moving forward, and for a considerable stretch, that momentum is truly exhilarating.
The action is often spectacular. Na has already demonstrated a remarkable command of the chase sequence throughout his previous work, but Hope gives him an enormously fresh canvas on which to play. Cars tear through narrow streets and over rubble, horses gallop through thick rows of trees, and characters race across mountain highways while the camera pulls back to emphasize just how tiny these people are against the enormous world and circumstances surrounding them. One true highlight is Michael Abel’s (Nope, Us, Get Out) score - one of Na’s newfound Western collaborators for this film. The music is appropriately massive and helps propel much of the movie’s momentum, while the production design gives Hope Harbor and the adjacent forest a real, live-in quality that makes the increasingly ridiculous destruction feel surprisingly tangible.
There is also a bit more going on beneath all the mayhem than the film’s goofy surface might suggest. The catastrophe ultimately stems from humanity’s inability to recognize other beings as worthy of life, turning Hope into a farflung exploration of othering, community and the instinct to destroy whatever we don’t understand. That perspective is what makes the film’s increasingly committed strange choices more interesting, even when they don’t entirely work.
Despite all the excitement, Hope does unfortunately start to drag. There are stretches where the action (as great as it is) becomes repetitive, particularly as the aliens repeatedly absorb an absurd amount of bullets, grenades and general punishment before getting back up and charging forward again for another round of the exact same thing. The movie is already long enough without several of these sequences essentially becoming Looney Tunes sketches, for better or worse.
And then there is the ending, which decides to move from our lovable human cast towards the alien mythology and seems very deliberately positioned to set up a continuation. I’m not convinced Hope needs one. In fact, part of me would rather leave these bizarre creatures as a mostly incomprehensible mystery than spend another movie explaining their lore. I feel like the less I understand about why these things are having teary-eyed alien-language conversations with one another, the better off I am.
“This the fucking circus?” a bewildered Nak-yeon asks in the middle of one of the film’s increasingly insane chase sequences. I consider that line to be the essential DNA of what Hope is ultimately delivering as a movie experience, and personally, I had a hell of a good time at the circus.
‘Hope’ is now playing in theaters.
