A man rides on horseback through the woods as fast as he can while a large four-legged predator leaps down on him from the trees and unhinges its jaws big enough to swallow the man whole and take a sizable bite out of the horse. Then the title of the movie comes up: Hope. So goes the teaser trailer for the South Korean monster movie that opens today rather than on Friday in more theaters than Korean imports usually get in Tarrant County. The title may strike you as strange, and indeed it’s something of a red herring, but the film is even crazier than that teaser suggests, which is more than good enough to make it our pick this week.
The main character is Ko Beum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the police chief of a quiet coastal village near the North Korean border called Hope Harbor. The first half-hour of the movie is a Spielbergian study in suspense, as Chief Ko is driving back into town when he notices a massive hole torn through the front of the village’s real estate office, with the workers inside ripped apart. Much like Spielberg did with the T. rex in Jurassic Park, writer-director Na Hong-jin artfully keeps the monster offscreen as long as he can. Instead, he tracks the chief as he follows the trail of destruction through his town. The lawman is so scared that a sudden noise makes him deliver four shotgun blasts into a puddle of water.
When we finally do see the monster, it’s a 10-foot-tall being that grabs one of his deputies and slams him into another deputy with enough force to turn both men into goo. On an intellectual level, I love the creature design here, as the space aliens look more evolved than the humans when they’re walking upright. However, they can also run on all fours, in which form they are feral and vicious and can outrun a car.
They look great in close-up when they’re standing still. The same can’t be said for when they’re in long shot running full tilt after their prey, where their motion looks janky and unrelated to the terrain that they’re running over. While this is a better monster movie than The End of Oak Street, the lack of polish is distracting, a hard flaw to overlook for the most expensively made film in South Korea’s history. Na does recruit some well-known Hollywood actors (Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton) to portray the aliens via motion capture, and to be honest, they’re overqualified for what they’re called on to do here.
This begs for comparison with Bong Joon-ho’s The Host from 20 years ago, and I’m afraid Na’s script doesn’t have that kind of depth: It turns out a backwoods dimwit (Eum Moon-suk) might have doomed the human race by shooting one of the aliens’ babies. However, the film does match Bong’s dark humor, as an old man who has seen the aliens (Im Hyun-sik) tries to describe them to the police but repeatedly wanders into tangents giving the details of his bout of diarrhea. The chief’s young second cousin (Zo In-sung) appears to kill one of the aliens, only for his moment of triumph to blow up in the most anti-climactic way. Holding it all down is Hwang, who previously played a shaman in Na’s exorcism movie The Wailing. He is at home portraying a bumbling coward who has to face down a threat beyond his comprehension.
Na has a flair for action that rivals even his compatriot. The slow burn of the film’s opening is put to good use again in a scene where a posse of men with guns locate the aliens’ spaceship in the forest and then find themselves being hunted. The climactic freeway chase is a frenetic counterpart that includes that second cousin leaping from a galloping horse onto a speeding cop car, and I’ll bet every director of Westerns is jealous that they couldn’t pull off that trick. Despite an overly abrupt ending, Hope turns out to be true to its title in paying tribute to the infuriating defiance of the human spirit. It pays off in the mid-credits final shot, which may have the movie’s darkest and funniest joke.
Hope
Starring Hwang Jung-min and Zo In-sung. Written and directed by Na Hong-jin. Rated R.
