For a whole decade since 2016’s extraordinarily uncanny horror-hybrid “The Wailing,” fans of Korean director Na Hong-jin have been peering anxiously at the horizon awaiting his next uncategorizable genre mash-up. More recently, like a bumbling local police chief removing his mirrored aviators to squint at an unidentifiable what-the-hell-is-that wreaking havoc in the distance, we’ve tracked reports of his new project, which despite a high-profile international cast and the largest production budget in Korean film history, remained almost until the last second shrouded in secrecy. Now that “Hope” is here — hilarious, unwieldy, overlong and featuring some of the most breathtakingly elegant action moviemaking of this or any year — one has to ask if anything could possibly have lived up to the anticipation.
It’s a question that seems mischievously on writer-director Na’s mind, as for a good portion of the outstandingly berserk first hour, it seems possible we will never actually see the creature causing all the gloriously choreographed mayhem. A camera glides over spectacular mountains at dawn, taking in a coastline littered with tiny islets, where nestles the small town of Hope Harbor, a shabby South Korean hamlet that is close enough to its northern neighbor/nemesis that weathered billboards warn against landmines and urge residents to “Report Spies!” and “Guard Against Infiltrators!”
It is maybe the late ’80s — in any case, pre-cellphones — and Bum-seok (an irreplaceable Hwang Jung-min, reuniting with Na after “The Wailing”), the chief of police in this one-horse town, has been called out to a vast flat field on its outskirts to investigate the gorily mysterious mutilation of a large cow. Its carcass has been discovered by a group of hunters led by Sung-ki (Zo In-Sung), who is Bum-seok’s second cousin. Here, everybody knows or is related to everyone else, as will be proven in just a few minutes when Bum-seok will be pegging it down the devastated streets and alleyways of Hope Harbor, namechecking every second bloodied corpse he passes.
For the moment, however, he is pontificating over the dead cow, and having his chain yanked by the hunters who spin him a yarn about a semi-mythical tiger who comes down from the North every once in a while to feed, having learned how to avoid the landmines. The hunters decide to head to the forest to track the creature, whatever it is. But as soon as Bum-seok heads back into town it becomes readily apparent that they’ve been infiltrated by something much worse than a defecting North Korean big cat, something capable of charging through brick walls and flinging entire cars at retreating locals.
Worse still: with the gang of hunters away from the scene, there is no help or backup to be had, with all extra manpower off fighting wildfires — that is, until Officer Sung-ae (“Squid Game” star Hoyeon, making a fantastically characterful big-screen debut here) shows up to the rescue in her squad car. Rather than being scared, Sung-ae is pissed: “It’s killed so many people,” she bellows, executing a perfect handbrake turn, “Monster or not, it’s just not right!”
It’s hard to overstate just how wildly entertaining this first hour is: a kind of riff on, of all things, Ron Underwood’s terrific cult classic “Tremors,” only scaled up to be expansive as well as expensive, with genius cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (“Parasite,” “Burning,” “The Wailing”) wielding his gliding camera with an insolent grace that itself seems like a sarcastic comment on the utter chaos and carnage of Lee Hwokyoung’s production design.
There are team-ups and fuck-ups and everyone character is, well, a character. Bum-seok encounters a grizzled elder holed up under a bridge and goes on a brief monster-hunt foray with him, which ends when the pair open fire on the critter through a closed door, only to discover it was actually the local butcher making a phone call. The ill-fated meat-slinger murmurs into the receiver, “Honey, I’ll call you back,” before glancing down at his likely mortal shotgun wounds and crumpling to the floor. Bum-seok then has to navigate the practical difficulties of getting a small old man to heft a large, leaking, perforated butcher on his back to the hospital.
It’s an endless pleasure to see such exceptional, careful, considered filmmaking applied to such a gleefully generic set-up. Even when some of the tricks become apparent, each new repetition somehow delivers more than the last. For sheer high-octane, bloodrush delight, for example, there is very little that can beat the effect when a speeding car pulls a U-turn and the breakneck camera swings around to look at it recede, now moving away from it, as though the camera itself had built up such careening kinetic momentum that it needs basically a runway’s length to be able to change course. And then, just when everything is going so great (for us, if not for the mostly dead characters) we see the creature — this one played in motion capture by Cameron Britton.
Perhaps it was always going to be a disappointment, but the weightless, old-school videogame aesthetic of the alien monster design sticks out even further amid the stylishness of the world captured in-camera. And those problems are magnified in the slack middle section of this 160-minute film, as the hunters make discoveries of their own in the forest, unnecessary subplots and alien characters multiply, and there are some halfhearted attempts at giving them a thin backstory. Nothing in their mythology, however, is as amusing as one old-timer’s minutely scatological explanation for what he was doing when he first witnessed them in the woods (clue: it’s also what bears do in a popular idiom, and was the result of some iffy spicy pork the night before). And nothing is as interesting within the alien-invader narrative as the fact that they are played by the film’s biggest international stars.
“Hope” is almost heroic — and extremely unusual for a film in Cannes Competition, where, to be honest, it does not rationally fit — in its lack of thematic weight or political/philosophical subtext. But if you want to risk pulling a muscle you can, at a reach, read the casting of Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell as the heavily CG-disguised, rather po-faced alien clan, as a sly inversion of the traditional othering of Asian actors in Hollywood’s own blockbusters. But yeah, it’s a stretch. And by the time the last third of the film regains its breakneck, bananas tempo, culminating in an all-timer of a highway chase where everything is flung up there on the screen (except an anti-tank rocket that, flouting the laws of Chekov’s Bazooka, is glimpsed but never used) you will have learnt to mostly ignore the janky VFX anyway. Best to sit back and enjoy the human drama, human stunts (perhaps this is an early contender for the first ever Best Stunt Design Oscar?) and unflagging human comedy of this alien-encounter movie. Because we may be slower, dumber and ultimately less noble than our potential extra-terrestrial overlords, but we sure are a hell of a lot more fun.
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