Hope

It’s even rarer that I consider this a good thing. Anyone who’s seen The Wailing should know to expect the unexpected when sitting down for a Na Hong-jin movie, but this sci-fi/fantasy whatsit is relentlessly strange even by his standards: a 160-minute action epic reminiscent of The Host, Prometheus, and even Avatar before it ends so abruptly you’ll wonder whether it’s actually ending at all. It’s also endlessly ambitious and so fully committed to being whatever the hell it is that you genuinely have to see it to believe it.

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Na’s first film in a decade begins as a mystery propelled by a simple, terrifying question: what could leave behind claw marks that big? That’s the question on everyone’s mind following the discovery of a dead bull in the middle of a rural road in fictional Hope Harbor, with everyone offering their own competing theories as to the culprit. Some think it was a bear, which would make sense if those claw marks weren’t twice as large as a grizzly’s. Others believe it must have been a tiger, a national symbol that has taken on near-mythic quality despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it’s long since gone extinct in South Korea. Investigating this matter falls on Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), Hope Harbor’s police chief and seemingly the only resident not given to flights of fancy.

Whatever it is leaves a literal trail of death and destruction in its wake, with Bum-seok always a block or two behind his quarry. Na and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo film the carnage like a breathless police ride-along and never take their foot off the gas. Bodies are strewn about, buildings lay in ruin, and it’s increasingly clear that a small-town cop armed with a shotgun as he awaits reinforcements is vastly outmatched by this fantastical creature. Were he prone to waxing philosophical, you could almost imagine Bum-seok quoting No Country for Old Men’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: “I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job, but I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand.”

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He eventually receives backup in the form of Im Sung-ae, a rookie played by Squid Game breakout Ho-yeon. She’s far less reticent than her chief, whose sudden (and justified) case of the yips is frequently played for humor. It takes the better part of an hour to finally catch a glimpse of the monster they’re pursuing, a reveal that proves worth the wait — especially once you notice that its eyes appear to be filled with tears for reasons that won’t be made clear until much later.

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Na, whose sensibility draws as much from the grindhouse as it does from the arthouse, favors long, winding narratives full of sequences that feel like they go on twice as long as they would if anyone else had directed them. The result is never boring — there’s simply too much going on at all times — but it can be overstimulating. And though it would initially appear to have wider appeal than The Wailing, an occult murder mystery that proved massively successful in South Korea, Hope is ultimately even weirder in Ha’s increasingly distinct way.

You genuinely have to see it to believe it.

The 52-year-old is rarely mentioned alongside the lies of Lee Chang-dong, Bong Joon-ho, or Park Chan-wook when discussing their country’s greatest filmmakers, but he’s just as ambitious in his use of genre tropes. If Hope leaves little time to wonder as to the meaning behind its nonstop action, it also leaves clues along the way: mentions of minefields left over from the Korean War in one scene, a sign reading “protect the nation from infiltration” in another.

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The experience of actually watching all this play out is as close to riding a rollercoaster as any movie you’re likely to see, especially that breakneck first act — if the characters never get a chance to catch their breath, Na seems to reason, neither should we. It’s a bit rickety at times, but a thrill ride unlike any in recent memory nevertheless. And if you think the relentless oddity has peaked by the time two nonhuman entities start speaking to one another in subtitled dialogue, just wait until the credits roll and you realize who played them. None of this makes a great deal of sense if you stop and think about it, to which the solution is obvious: don’t stop and think about it.

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That goes double for the ending, which isn’t a cliffhanger so much as it is the narrative actively choosing to fall off a cliff and bring us along for the ride. And yet there’s so much creativity and ambition in the two-and-a-half hours preceding this final act of cinematic chutzpah that the disbelief it inspires isn’t so much of the “what the hell did I just watch?” variety as it is “how the hell did Na come up with that?” It’s a minor miracle for a movie like this to still get made, let alone premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, make tens of millions of dollars in its native country, and receive a wide theatrical release in ours. Hope, in its own unique way, provides just that for anyone pessimistic about the current state of film.