CANNES: “Hope” arrives 10 years after South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s “The Wailing” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the competition section in 2016. Since “The Chaser” in 2008, Na’s cinema has always been built on a kind of controlled action-driven collapse in stories that begin within recognizable genre territory, before spiraling toward paranoia and grotesque comedy. And with “Hope,” Na pushes this tendency further than anything he has done before, as the movie becomes an experiment of how much movement, absurdity and tonal instability a film can absorb.
Set inside a remote harbor town named Hope, the film initially disguises itself as rural mystery cinema. Dead livestock appear in the mountains and strange attacks spread through the village, while policemen wander through muddy roads and collapsing buildings trying to understand what exactly is happening. But Na has never really cared about mystery in the regular sense. Suspense, for him, is a mechanism for destabilization as he delays revelation to trap the viewer inside movement and physical tension.
What follows during the film’s first hour might be the strongest stretch of action filmmaking this year, when it transforms itself into one extended pursuit sequence: vehicles crashing through narrow roads, policemen firing uselessly into the distance while destruction spreads faster than comprehension. The chase functions as the narrative here, and together with cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo — who worked on Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” in 2018 and the Academy Award Winner Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” in 2019 — the pair demonstrate these sequences with overwhelming physical intensity.
The film is filled with grotesque tonal ruptures: vulgar jokes appearing seconds after horrifying violence and characters reacting to catastrophe with absurd casualness. And somehow, this instability becomes the film’s real energy as the director embraces chaos with reckless sincerity. Even once the creatures fully appear — big humanoid alien beings performed by Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender — they suddenly begin speaking in their own untranslated language, entire scenes without the audience fully understanding what is being said, while the narrative continues accelerating regardless. The effect is bizarrely disorienting and intentionally so, as Na wants the spectator to be trapped within its momentum.
There are moments where “Hope” recalls the works of Steven Spielberg at his most physically playful, mixed with the violent momentum of George Miller’s chase cinema in his “Mad Max” film series, yet it is all filtered through Na’s unique Korean sensibilities, where characters stumble through destruction with a kind of bamboozlement that constantly undercuts heroic action-movie logic. Nobody in the film ever truly appears capable of controlling the situation.
What is refreshing about “Hope” is that it never attempts to disguise its desire to entertain. Surrounded by the Cannes Film Festival’s official competition films, weighed down by historical symbolism and carefully calculated seriousness, Na arrived with a gigantic monster movie that commits itself to action. Although the film certainly becomes repetitive in its later stretches, and not every CGI creation fully convinces, even at its messiest, “Hope” remains alive in a way that much contemporary blockbuster cinema no longer is.
