The South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin has directed four feature films over the past 18 years. They're terrific, if not for the faint of heart. I still remember watching Na's 2008 debut, The Chaser, and thinking I'd rarely seen a more brutally relentless thriller — or a darker statement about the elusiveness of law and order.
His next one, The Yellow Sea, was even better, a gripping mob movie that was also a wrenching portrait of a Korean Chinese immigrant on the run — a man without a country. Na is a master of tone and genre, and there's a genuine moral undertow to his movies even as they balance comedy, tragedy and bone-crunching violence.
Na's latest movie, Hope, is a big step up in ambition, if maybe a step down in finesse. It's been divisive — passionately praised and witheringly dismissed, sometimes in the same breath. It's a sprawling, big-budget monster movie set in a remote South Korean town that comes under attack from giant shape-shifting aliens. That made it an admittedly odd choice to premiere in competition at the recent Cannes Film Festival, though I was grateful for the genre-movie diversion — and floored, as usual, by the robustness of Na's action chops. Even Hope's dumb stretches — and it has them, for sure — are touched by brilliance. The movie blurs the lines between schlock and art.
It begins in a town called Hope Harbor, located near the border with North Korea. The surrounding countryside is full of barbed wire and undetonated land mines; the residents are used to being on high alert. Yet their most dangerous enemy hails not from across the border, but from the skies. Extraterrestrial monsters have descended and laid waste to the town.
The local police chief, played by Hwang Jung-min, arrives late on the scene, and it's through his eyes that we see the destruction after it's already happened. But we don't see the monsters right away. For roughly the first hour of this more than two-and-a-half-hour movie, Na steers us through a dim labyrinth of damaged stores and homes, building up our nervous anticipation, scene by scene. Like the Steven Spielberg who made Jaws, Na knows that the less we see, the scarier things are.
Indeed, it's a bit of a disappointment when we finally do get a clear look at the monsters, who resemble creatures out of a zombie-apocalypse video game circa the early 2000s. But this isn't a dealbreaker. The CGI may be third-rate, but Hope has some of the most exhilaratingly sustained action scenes I've seen in years.
Na has a strange ability to juggle nerve-shredding realism with an outlandish, almost slapstick level of violence. Watching his characters tear through the streets with a monster in hot pursuit is like watching the Steve McQueen classic Bullitt, a Mad Max movie and a Looney Tunes cartoon rolled into one. And there's an extraordinarily beautiful sequence in the woods, in which the pursuit takes place on horseback, that has the majesty of a Western.
There are lengthy stretches of downtime, during which we get to know the people of Hope, most of them prickly types with salty mouths and big guns. The character development is minimal, but the performances stick with you. Jung Ho-yeon of Squid Game fame is terrific as a plucky police deputy who's a demon behind the wheel. And Zo In-sung is hilarious as an irascible hunter who stares down one of the aliens and turns out to have more lives than Wile E. Coyote.
As for the aliens themselves: Na deliberately keeps us in the dark and off-balance in terms of who they are, where they come from, and what exactly they want from planet Earth. It's worth noting that they are played by well-known Hollywood actors, including Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell, though it's hard to recognize them under so many layers of CGI, especially given the incomprehensible language they speak. Part of me wondered if Na were making a wry commentary on the inequities of blockbuster filmmaking, by pitting his Korean ensemble against a bunch of better-known Hollywood stars.
But then, in the final minutes of Hope, a truly bizarre narrative reversal occurs. Let's just say that the movie squeezes an entire film's worth of backstory into five minutes and suggests there's more to these extraterrestrial beings than we might have thought. The movie ends on a laughably abrupt cliffhanger, but one with a touch of self-awareness: Na has already said in interviews that he's planning a sequel. Will the next movie clear up some of our confusion? We can always hope.
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