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South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin’s latest film is his biggest and wildest yet.
Hoyeon and Hwang Jung-min in ‘Hope.’ (Neon)
Na Hong-jin makes chase movies and it can be incredible where they go.
His latest, Hope, is his biggest and wildest movie yet. But despite its heft in scale and run time, it rarely pauses to take a breath.
Though some of Na’s contemporaries are better known in the West, the South Korean writer-director has for two decades been a must-see filmmaker for breathless spectacles laced with pointed satire and scruffy humanity. His appropriately titled 2008 debut, The Chaser, focused on a pimp and former police officer trying to find a missing sex worker in a helter-skelter search through nocturnal Seoul.
Since then, the headlong pursuits of Na have grown more expansive and extreme. A gambling-addicted taxi driver on the run (2010’s The Yellow Sea). A police officer hunting down the cause of a disease outbreak in rural Korea (2016’s The Wailing).
The scope of Hope, his first film in a decade, is so vast that Na spent two years in post-production toiling over it before premiering it at the Cannes Film Festival in May — in a slightly different cut than is now arriving in theaters. As if a 156-minute run time wasn’t enough, it was also made with a sequel in mind.
But through those two and a half-plus hours, Hope hurtles its way through genres the way the Kool-Aid Man crashed through walls. It is not always a smooth ride. The CGI in Hope won’t win any awards. And the movie is overlong, sapping some of its momentum. But it is often thrillingly shape-shifting: a gloriously unwieldy spectacle that fuses monster movie and science fiction into a blistering and bonkers saga of otherness — human and otherwise.
Signs reading “Protect the nation against infiltration” can be seen in the town of Hope Harbor on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone. There, the local police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is investigating a mysterious animal attack. The best guess of a group of hunters led by Sung-ki (Zo In-Sung) is that a tiger has made it through barbed wire fields from North Korea.
Bum-seok, though, is soon on the trail of something evidently much larger and more destructive than a loose tiger. Long before he — or we — get a look at what’s running amok, he chases through the rubble wake with increasing trepidation. Expletives make up almost all his breathless dialogue.
It will be almost an hour before we get a look at what he’s after. Once we do, it’s a bit of a letdown. The CGI makeup of the creature — a towering but lean and sinewy alien that sometimes stands tall and sometimes runs on all fours (played in motion capture by Cameron Britton) — is a little schlocky in design. But it’s telling that Na’s movie turns on a slow-motion close-up, when Bum-seok recognizes something like pain in the eyes of the marauding monster.
Na’s movies have never been particularly kind to the authorities; they’re usually shown as either incompetent or corrupt. In Hope, they’re mostly bumbling or way out of their depth. But Bum-seok is at least charging forward, albeit not with as much panache as his fellow officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon). She joins the chase midway, elegantly speeding into the fray in a squad car while shooting out the window. This is the big-screen debut of Hoyeon, of Squid Game, and, from the very first moment, she’s winning.
After the chase — which runs for the better part of an hour — Bum-seok and Sung-ae begin trying to investigate what they’ve encountered. It’s probably the baggiest part of the film but it’s also when Na is at his most mischievous. There is, for example, the medical examination of the alien’s corpse, carried out not with calm precision but with a chain saw. And then there’s the unforgettable eyewitness account of a villager who’s seen the aliens in the forest — while terrified, crouching in hiding and trying to hold back diarrhea. In vain, it turns out.
‘Hope’ is screening in theaters nationwide.
