Hope Is A Nonstop Sci-Fi Thriller That Goes Off The Rails In The Best Way
There’s hope yet for the absurd alien invasion movie.
The corpse of a mauled bull lies in the middle of the road. The fresh claw marks are dug deep into its flesh, attracting flies whose irritating buzzing is only drowned out by the even more irritating chatter of the men who discovered the bull — a group of salt-of-the-earth locals who were heading for their weekly hunt in the mountains. They’ve called over the village police chief, Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), to investigate this strange occurrence, and are already plaguing him with their theories of what did this: It can’t be a dog. Maybe it’s a bear. Or maybe, wild theory, it’s a tiger.
Bum-seok, a blowhard police officer who secretly thinks himself above his station at this sleepy rural village bordering a forest near the DMZ, pooh-poohs their speculation, but can’t help but be convinced by their tiger theory after they cite the testimony of one of the trusted local hunters. They’re not too far from the North Korean border, after all, and maybe a tiger somehow made its way through the mountains from Siberia. Worried about a tiger on the loose in a village mostly populated by the elderly, Bum-seok starts to call in back-up from the precinct, but finds they’re all preoccupied putting out nearby wildfires. Meanwhile, the group of hunters, led by Bum-seok’s rugged cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), joke about pranking Bum-seok with the tiger theory, but happen upon more strange evidence: demolished shacks, dead chickens, and strange, giant claw marks in the mud. Concerned, Sung-ki orders his group to bring out all their gear and investigate deeper into the forest. And thus begins Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi thriller Hope, a riotous and relentless alien invasion flick that gives new meaning to “off the rails.”
Hope is not a movie that deals in subtleties — that much is clear from the start with the discovery of that first corpse, which launches our ragtag group of characters straight into the action. It unfolds much like a small-town B-movie horror like Tremors crossed with the shaggy blockbuster thrills of Jaws, but with each element amplified in that specific K-horror way. The boisterous working-class characters are extra unseemly. The gore is extra bloody and gruesome. And the breathless oners that follow our characters through the destruction wrought by the mysterious monster are more relentlessly thrilling than most Hollywood action sequences. Paired with Na Hong-jin’s talent for wringing out the most drama out of working-class horror, Hope is a supercharged sci-fi spectacle at its most exciting…and sometimes most unwieldy.
It’s no surprise that Hope is at its best when it’s edging its audience: we follow Bum-seok as he races back to the village, only to discover that he’s too late — the monster has carved a bloody path through half the town. He follows its path (rather annoyingly, shouting and screaming the entire time) but always seems 10 steps behind, only catching glimpses of the monster but seeing in vivid detail the bodies that it’s crushed and the cars that it’s flipped. And while each sequence — which builds to a near-unbearable crescendo of suspense — is immaculately filmed by Na and his cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, this segment of the film starts to become a chore to watch simply because Bum-seok is wildly unlikable. To be honest, Hope often plays like an endurance test for the viewer, challenging your capacity for rowdy protagonists whose shouts are barely drowned out by the firearms that they’re constantly shooting. Their trigger-happy ways have a sociopolitical reason — they live in paranoia near the border of North Korea, after all — but Na does seem to show a grubby delight in making an alien invasion movie where first contact is made with the worst possible humans, only this time they’re not Americans.
Bum-seok looks for the monster.
But just when Hope starts to become a tiresome exercise in dudes shouting, Bum-seok’s rookie deputy, Sung-ae (Squid Game breakout Hoyeon), literally crashes in with the full strength of the police department’s armory behind her, and the movie starts to sing again. Hoyeon enters the film like a jolt of electricity, and suddenly the momentum begins to move — we get our first encounter with the monster, and Hope drops its nonstop action in favor of a more erratic, but more giddily entertaining, structure. Flashbacks fill in the gaps of the monster’s arrival, and more grubby characters are introduced to give the movie a strange color and charm. And Sung-ki and his gang finally start to zero in on the alien plot, deep in the forest, which takes the film down even weirder avenues.
Hope is a movie that is brilliant in parts, and baffling in others — a true tonal hodgepodge that embodies the best and (and maybe the most mildly embarrassing) of Korean film. In a way, its general unpolished vibe feels like a throwback to Korean cinema before it was on the world stage. But that’s part of its B-movie charm: it’s sometimes hard to follow, and other times inexplicable, but you can’t deny its gonzo entertainment value.
