I feel as if I could watch the first hour-plus of Na Hong-jin’s new science-fiction horror creature feature, Hope, multiple times a day for the next week and still be very much in awe of it. In stark contrast, I’m not positive that I could even make it through another sitting of that same film’s third act. Such is very much the dynamism and tension at the heart of Hope, a film that manages to both be an absolutely astonishing cinematic achievement and a befuddling misstep within the confines of its three-hour runtime.
The South Korean film is set in Hope Harbor and plays out as a slice-of-life story, if that slice of life just so happened to be infested with gargantuan extraterrestrial beings seemingly hell-bent on destruction. The story opens with Ko Bum-seok, the local police chief (as played to absolutely incredible effect by Hwang Jung-min), being called to help move an inexplicably slaughtered cattle from the road, and steadily escalates from there, as more and more is revealed about the true nature of this initial mystery.
Na Hong-jin both wrote and directed Hope, and it's difficult to overstate just how miraculous of a fear the opening hour of this film truly is. From the opening frames, there is such a pervasive sense of tone and pace. Na Hong-jin and his cinematographer, Hong Kyung-pyo, capture the vast majority of the film with these gorgeous wide-angle, deep-focus lenses that bring a real sense of clarity and impact to the film.
This is such a smart choice in so many ways. For one, it allows the audience to really soak up the ambiance of Hope Harbor as a location and understand the full extent of the damage done to it once things really get going. This also stands as a tremendous testament to production designer Lee Hwo-kyoung’s work, which is nothing short of utterly mesmerizing. But beyond that, opting for these large-scale canvases helps to emphasize the horror of the unknown forces that seem to be lurking just beyond the edges of these expansive frames for the first act and then really highlight the white-knuckled brutality of the violence once shit hits the fan.
The editing is also absolutely incredible, with editor Kim Sun-min and Na Hong-jin clearly operating in lock-step synchronicity with one another. It is genuinely difficult to overstate just how masterfully crafted Hope is in this first hour, as it painstakingly chronicles Ko Bum-seok returning to town and tracking an increasingly widening trail of destruction, attempting to figure out exactly what is happening in real-time. In lesser hands, the length of this sequence could have so easily resulted in something that fell flat or lost its sense of tension within the first few minutes. But as it stands, Hope turns what is ostensibly a very long sequence of a man rounding a bunch of corners while holding a shotgun into some of the most thrilling and intricately compelling stuff I’ve seen on the big screen this year.
Within this first hour, the character work is also sublime. Again, it is certainly not difficult to imagine a lesser version of this in which the character of Ko Bum-seok is essentially a blank canvas, acting as an unobtrusive audience surrogate. But instead, Na Hong-jin makes the inspired decision to have this character start the film as a small-town police chief would in such a situation: truly scared shitless. We as an audience get to see Ko Bum-seok change as a character over the course of his odyssean journey through Hope Harbor’s remains, and the whole experience makes the film feel that much richer as a result.
This first hour comes to a conclusion with a pretty clear demarcation point, and things shift over into a decidedly different kind of pace and tone for the second act. And while it’s clearly an act of the film in which things are both being examined in a different light and set up for the final act yet-to-come, it is nonetheless thrilling. Hope is often a very funny movie, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the second act, which has one of the most unexpectedly hysterical-and-grave-in-equal-measure quasi-interrogation scenes I’ve ever seen. This is also where the film is able to really wear many of its most profound influences on its sleeve, with Na Hong-jin actively quoting things like Spielberg’s Jaws and Ridley Scott’s Alien in overt ways.
Heading into the third act, things have been well and truly teed up for what feels like it should be a monumentous finale, as more and more details about the nature of this threat are revealed and the full extent of their presence is unearthed. I really cannot overstate just how gung-ho I was still at this point in the film. And yet, once the third act kicked into gear, I could not have been less enthused.
For all the meticulous care and craft that went into making that first hour of Hope so thrilling and masterful in its gradual escalation, the third act feels as if it was thrown together haphazardly and with absolutely none of that same attention to detail. This final at hits the ground running at an insane speed and then just gets stuck in that same gear for the entire rest of its runtime. The result is something that plays its entire hand immediately and then just grows increasingly repetitive, dull, and outright frustrating. There’s a lot happening onscreen at any given time, from the introduction of a whole gaggle of new extraterrestrial creatures to characters riding around on horseback while firing machine guns, and yet after a few minutes of this, the impact of it all just feels so blunted.
If the first act of Hope is like watching Na Hong-jin and co. very gradually tighten a screw with the utmost patience and precision, then the final act of Hope is like watching that same team just immediately strip the screw but keep on screwing.
Much has already been said about the VFX in Hope, and to that I will simply say that I had little-to-no problem with it in the first act, when the CGI was used in increasingly inspired ways and blended with a ton of practical effects work to really sell the impact of it in impressive ways. However, by the third act, Hope is so increasingly focused on entirely CG characters performing entirely CG actions that the quality of the animation itself does become a detriment to the film. This is a film that spends its first hour so skillfully masking the actual ‘monsters’ within the film from sight but then ostensibly ends with those same monsters giving multi-minute-long monologues, and it feels just as jarring as that sounds.
There’s a part of me that can’t help but admire the absolute go-for-broke ambition on display in this about-face for the finale, but that is detracted from substantially by the film eschewing anything resembling actual closure for the film. Hope ends on what can only be described as a cliffhanger and neglects to bring any of the fascinating character arcs or larger themes that it has been so rooted in prior to its final act to any kind of resolution. Instead, the movie just kind of abruptly ends after three hours.
GRADE: B
That leaves Hope in a strange position. On the one hand, I genuinely believe that the first hour of Hope is probably one of the greatest things I’ve seen in cinemas this year. On the other hand, the final act was such a befuddling disappointment that I can’t help but admit that, yes, it sullied my perception of the film as a whole. Ultimately, I would never not recommend this movie; it’s insane, and you should absolutely see it for yourself. I look forward to checking it out again soon and seeing if some of the dissonance I felt can be resolved on subsequent viewings. Here’s hoping.
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