Na Hong-jin’s Hope is one of the most baffling movies of the decade. After premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the wildly mixed reactions from critics and festival goers placed the film high on my watchlist. After all, Hope hardly fits the bill of your typical Cannes premiere, especially one in the main competition lineup. It’s a CGI-heavy creature feature, more focused on intense action than developing its characters or storyline. Hope is no less absurd outside of the Cannes lineup, and, a week after seeing the film, I still don’t quite know what to think. Still, I will always admire a movie that takes big swings, and Hope certainly doesn’t shy away from taking every risk possible.
The film follows Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), a bumbling police chief of a small town in South Korea, just outside of the Korean Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula in two. Hope takes no time to establish its protagonist — instead, the film opens on the discovery of a cow’s corpse covered in strange markings. Unsure what could have killed it, Bum-seok returns to town for reinforcements, while his rebellious second cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) leads a group of hunters into the forest to try and find the creature’s habitat. The set-up is quick, and the film immediately launches into action. Bum-seok finds that the cow-killer has beaten him back to the town of Hope Harbor and has already launched a vicious attack on the small village. With the rest of the force busy dealing with nearby wildfires, Bum-seok is forced to hunt down the monster himself.
Of course, Hope runs for a sprawling two hours and 36 minutes. The initial monster chase takes up only an hour of runtime. As entertaining as it is to watch Bum-seok realize how unprepared he is to hunt and kill a gigantic monster, it is only after he has completed this mission (with the help of rookie officer Im Sung-ae, played by Jung Ho-yeon) that the audience realizes the full scope of the film. Back in the forest, Ko Sung-ki discovers an alien spacecraft. It slowly dawns on the viewer that the monster ravaging Hope Harbor was an extraterrestrial being, and that if it came on a spaceship, it’s almost certainly not alone.
Na Hong-jin is much more interested in the spectacle of the film than in its characters. We understand each protagonist’s role: Bum-seok as the small town cop whose fantasies of becoming a hero keep him from realizing the scope of the invasion, Im Sung-ae as the younger rookie who has to step in to save the chief, and Ko Sung-ki as the rebellious relative whose unusual methods clash with his by-the-books cousin. None of the characters are particularly unique or developed by the end of the film. It’s everything else that makes Hope unique: its huge action set pieces, extended car chases and alien fight scenes kept me engaged throughout the runtime.
Additionally, Hope Harbor’s location creates an interesting political context in the background of the film. It feels intentional that Na Hong-jin sets his film so close to the neutral Demilitarized Zone. In the background of many scenes, signs are posted warning citizens of spies among them — meanwhile, the threat the town faces isn’t an internal one, but something from an entirely different world. Still, by the end of the film, I wasn’t quite sure what Na Hong-jin was trying to say, if anything. Perhaps this is intentional: The film has one of the most jarringly abrupt endings I’ve ever seen, revealing that the film is an unadvertised beginning to a two-part series. Whatever Hope means may not be revealed until this unexpected sequel — and even if I’ve found Hope difficult to chew on, I think I may have found it just entertaining enough to want to buy a ticket for part two.
‘Projections’ is a column focused on reviewing recent film releases.
Nicholas York is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a columnist for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at nyork@cornellsun.com.
