★★★ (3 out of 4)
Before you go snob on me and claim you don’t do “monster” movies, let me point out that South Korea’s “Hope” competed for the prestigious Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Such is the reputation of its writer-director, Na Hong-jin. This dude doesn’t do cheapies or rush jobs. Na’s most recent film, “The Wailing,” released a full decade ago, was the top Korean film of its year. “Hope,” Na’s fourth feature and the most expensive ever for a Korean film (around $30 million), was three years in post-production before making its Cannes debut. Now in wide release, the film has many tricks up its sleeve, especially A-lister marrieds Michael Fassbinder and Oscar winner Alicia Vikander in their first K-horror epic. They’re in disguise, so don’t expect to recognize them. You can get all judgy on it if that’s your thinking. Look, I have my own axe to grind. “Hope” doesn’t land with half the visceral finesse of its liftoff. But when it’s cooking, this baby is on fire.
The plot jumps right into the action. The film is set in Hope Harbor, a town near the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, where the mostly elderly population is warned to look out for spies and the lesser evil of undetonated landmines. Th action starts with the discovery of a dead, mutilated body. It’s not a human; it’s a mutilated cow. A tiger gets the blame, though blustery police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, of “The Wailing”) is skeptical. A gory trail leads him and other hunters, including his second cousin, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), through the decimated town. Na, who’s never met a scary scene he can’t turn comic, breaks the tension with the banter between these two men. But tension gets an early grip.
The K terror doesn’t land with half the visceral finesse of its liftoff. But when it’s cooking, this baby is on fire.
And there’s another hunter on the scene. She’s a hellraising rookie cop called Sung-ae and she’s played by Jung Ho-yeon—the showstopper from “Squid Game”—like a force of nature who waits and bows for no man. And suddenly “Hope” finds the backbone of steel it needs and the human to root for in the face of any catastrophe, including an alien invasion.
What follows is a series of chases and narrow escapes that Na directs with gleeful ferocity and feeling. Camera wiz Hong Kyung-pyo, the master behind Bong Joon Ho's “Parasite” and Lee Chang-dong's “Burning,” swoops in and out and around and through roads and side alleys as if he’d seen “Mad Max: Fury Road” and got drunk on that film’s motorized exhilaration. There are no monsters. Not yet. Taking a tip from Spielberg and “Jaws,” Na holds off for almost an hour before he shows us what terror is in hot pursuit. And oh, that rumbling sound, like thunder hellbent on bursting our eardrums. There’s a terrific tactile element to everything Na lets explode on screen. We can almost feel it, touch it, taste it.
It’s then, less than hallway through a 160 minute epic, that we get a peek at the previously unseen. And what a letdown. Computer-generated imagery can be spectacular—think of James Cameron’s “Avatar” miracles, especially in “The Way of Water.” It can also be, when done cheaply or without expertise, a plague of smeared technology that takes us right out of the story. And that’s what happens here, with effects from the Korean VFX company Westworld that look like something out of an early computer game or devised by Grok for your home entertainment.
And here’s the big fake-out: Our stars, Fassbender and Vikander, are playing aliens who resemble motion-capture hybrids and speak undecipherable gobbledygook. The other creatures (there are many) go by in a blur, except for a more humanoid version known as Va’migere and who is modeled by Cameron Britton. If mocap hit its peak when Andy Serkis did the movements and the eerie voice for Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, it bottoms out here where the alien is denied any personality, except the instinct to kill.
I won’t spoil what goes on in the final stages of “Hope,” though I will note that a second film has been given a green light with the maybe promise of a franchise. We can “hope” that the tech gets better. But Na has very little to apologize for when it comes to the style and commitment he brings to the table. OK, a five-minute soliloquy about diarrhea may qualify as too much. Ditto an alien autopsy done with a chainsaw. But’s Na’s extremist taste for the tawdry is part of his DNA. Live with it. His talent is indisputable.
Even when repetition and shoddy effects get the best of the film, Na shows a healthy disrespect for formula. And he knows how to achieve momentum. That first chase, with Va’migere tearing after Sung-ae as she drives Bum-seok through the streets, is a kinetic marvel, as is a later scene when the hunters attempt to escape on horseback. As Vikander said at the film’s Cannes press conference: "The dream is to be able to work with an auteur. And director Na is an auteur who makes incredible cinema.” Her husband agrees: "Alicia told me to do it," Fassbender joked before adding: "That feeling of the unexpected can be very rare in cinema, and I think he’s a master at that."
Agreed. “Hope” shames the homogenized product that passes for originality at the multiplex. And even when the pacing dips along with the craftsmanship, Na redeems “Hope” with the flashes of brilliance that illuminate all of his work. Prepare to be wowed.