Buffalo Film: Film rides the edge of parody

By M. Faust

When the end credits for the new Korean monster movie Hope rolled, I was taken by surprise, for two reasons. 

Firstly, I knew going in that the movie would last about two hours and forty minutes. I forgot to bring my phone with me so I had no way to check the time (a very bad habit, I admit), but it really did not seem like that much time had elapsed. The movie drags badly in its last 45 minutes or so, but it still didn’t feel it had been on all that long. That’s good.

The other reason is not so good. I assumed the movie still had a way to go because the story was nowhere near being resolved. Writer-director Na Hong-jin has confirmed that a sequel is in the works, but that is hardly the proper word: what is on screen is clearly only the beginning of a longer project, probably conceived of as a trilogy.

And that’s the kind of thing you should know going it. 

Hope is the most expensive film ever made in South Korea, a country with a strong movie industry. But what really attracted me to it is the fact that it was screened in the “Un Certain Regard” section at the Cannes Film Festival, the kind of prestigious slot that is not given to anything run of the mill. I haven’t seen any of Na’s previous films—The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, The Wailing, none of which had more than minimal American distribution—but they have all been well regarded, so clearly his reputation preceded him at Cannes.

Set in a small fishing village named Hope, presumably near the North Korean border (the area is mined and there are signs everywhere warning residents to be wary of spies), the movie opens with local cop Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min, one of the country’s top stars) investigating a dead bull blocking a rural road. It was discovered by a hunting party, all packing heavier hardware than they would need to shoot rabbits. (The prevalence of military-grade armaments among the local populace is a running joke.) 

(I am aware that my parenthetical asides are getting out of control. It’s that kind of movie.)

From the size of the claw marks on it, the bull was clearly killed by something large and ferocious. That Hwang is willing to believe that the predator may have been a tiger clues us into something that the rest of the film proves in spades: this guy is not the sharpest crayon in the box.

From there, the movie diverges into two threads, one following Hwang as he returns to town and the other the hunters as they go into the forest, each for their own confrontations with the monsters. 

Sorry if that’s a spoiler: yes, there are multiple monsters. I will not otherwise give away their nature, other than to say that they are clearly CGI creations. Their use is inconsistent: they seem to vary in size, and are apparently able to change their shapes. 

It is a while before Hwang sees one. He instead witnesses the amount of damage that has been done to Hope’s main drag. The scale of wreckage done to buildings and debris strewn around the streets is impressive—the production designer and set decorators can expect Oscar nominations. 

What sets this apart from the usual monster movie stuff is the dryly comical tone. (I was reminded of the classic ’80s giant worm thriller Tremors, with Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward.) Hwang is clearly not up to the task of defending the town, and his solution to everything is to shoot first and hope there will be no questions afterward.

The heavily armed townsfolk are no better. His deputy takes the monstrous presence as a personal affront. The medical examiner looks forward to doing an autopsy but is frustrated by her lack of a sufficient saw. A survivor’s account of seeing the monsters in the woods is delivered with far too much attention to the bowel movement he was having at the time. (I’m pretty sure that this was intended to be funny, even if I was the only one in the theater laughing at it.)

All of this is entertaining enough that it makes up for CGI limitations of the actual monsters: the more time they spend on screen, the more tired you get of looking at them. 

Having done a little reading about Hope, I see that there is an alternate interpretation of it: it’s all a big joke on the audience in which an artistically ambitious filmmaker has delivered what appears to be a mainstream monster movie that is in fact a satire on the genre. (Call it Yorgos Lanthimos syndrome.)

I will admit that this offers an explanation for the tedious and ultimately unsatisfying overkill of the movie’s last hour. But if writer-director Na was able to talk backers into providing the largest budget in the history of his country’s film industry just to spit in his audience’s faces, he is clearly in the wrong line of work: politics awaits!