Hope (Hopeu, 호프)
Director – Na Hong-jin – 2026 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 160m
*****
A cop and various groups of hunters track then confront a monster wreaking havoc in a small town and the woodlands nearby – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 25th
Patrolling local cop Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min from Deliver Us From Evil, Hong Won-chan, 2020; The Wailing, Na Hong-jin, 2016; New World, Park Hoon-jung, 2013; Shiri, Kang Je-Gyu, 1999) and his second cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung from Escape From Mogadishu, Ryu Seung-wan, 2021; A Dirty Carnival, Yoo Ha, 2006) arrive at the scene of a tragedy where four men are waiting. Further down the road, initially in the distance and later seen in close up like so much in this film, lies the slaughtered bull, huge slashes on its flank.
The slashes are too big to have been made by a bear. One of the men suggests it’s the tiger that comes down from Siberia every few years. The men head to the woods where the tiger has been spotted. The cop’s route takes him into a nearby town of Hope Harbor, where huge holes in shop fronts suggest the presence of a creature much bigger than a tiger. After much unsuccessful hunting of the creature with his gun, the cop joins forces with Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-Hee from Squid Game, TV series, 2021), an armed man who he finds sheltering under a low canal bridge. Together, they enter one of the attacked shop fronts in the hope of finding the monster.
A truck carrying half a dozen soldiers arrives, to disappear into the distance or round a corner, only to later reappear equally suddenly. Sometimes they are firing. Plumes of smoke arise from parts of the city outside our view, indication the intermittent whereabouts of the monster.
The cop is later joined by his assistant Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon from Squid Game) whose car contains lots of guns, including grenade launchers. Once the pair of them are racing around in the car in pursuit of or fleeing from the monster, director Na delights in shots where the speeding reverse camera captures the speeding car when the cops decide to to a rapid U-turn at breakneck speed to drive in the opposite direction from the moving camera. Emphasising distance again.
While the monster’s presence can be felt right from the beginning, when the bull’s corpse is discovered, the monster itself doesn’t appear on the screen for maybe the first hour during which the director’s ratcheting up of the tension is relentless. This serves to make the viewer’s imagination do much of the work as you wonder exactly what the creature looks like. In the event, following the first, lengthy encounter with the creature, there are reports of more creatures, and these, when they eventually appear, look completely different from the first.
This is a long way from the school of monster filmmaking where you never see the monster for budgetary reasons. When the various creatures appear, they move as fast as any other monsters you’ve ever seen – their sheer speed recalls the aliens in A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018) who appear out of nowhere to snatch their victims away. There are a few different types of creatures, which reminded me of the long dead alien pilot early on in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) in the sense that, the character and his species are never fully explained and remain something of an enigma long after you’ve seen the film. Not that the creatures here look anything like that, just that they feel similarly enigmatic.
Here the monsters are pitted against various humans, often working in small groups, who for large parts of the film travel around in rapidly moving transport (in cars or on horseback) giving the speeding monsters a run for their money.
There is also a great deal of hand-held or shoulder-rested weaponry, placing the film in the same interpretation of science fiction action movies as The Terminator and, in particular, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1984 & 1991) where high-octane car chases with guns are the order of the day. Cameron’s vision is, however, much more urban, while NaHong-jin leans towards the rural. Even the town of Hope Harbor is very much a small town isolated in a wider rural setting of fields, woodlands and a network of deserted superhighways traversing picturesque hills and valleys, even if they bring to mind the concrete LA River canal in Terminator 2 while you’re watching.
The story plays out on the South side of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, a place of longstanding hostility and tension with an enemy power. That isn’t exactly what the story here is about, yet it lends the proceedings undeniable resonance.
In addition to the Korean cast, some English language actors are drafted in to play the monsters, who, it turns out, have their own language. Although the monsters are realised on the screen with striking visual effects work, director Na has had mixed in with all that via motion capture the actors’ faces so that, towards the end, Ma’veyyo and J’aur (bearing the faces and voices of Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander) have a deep and meaningful (subtitled) conversation as a massive spaceship slowly falls from the skies.
On a single viewing, this writer wasn’t sure about the ending (although he would happily watch the whole thing again), but for a creature feature with full on gun-toting and car chase action, look no further. A magnificent achievement.
Hope is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 25th.
Trailer: