Hope

Forget K-dramas and K-pop. The real deal is here. Directed by Na Hong-jin, Hope is reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made, and it shows. Unlike many Hollywood films that rely heavily on CGI, Hope combines computer-generated imagery with real action to deliver some astounding chase sequences. The film makes a compelling case for how to spend big bucks on an action thriller, with is fingers pointing towards Hollywood- this is how you do it.

At 160 minutes, this film is double the length it should have been. At one and a half monsters, it had just the right number, before becoming greedy. Writer-director Na Hong-jin, whose films combining horror and thrills have had both commercial and critical success, overplays his hand here. So much so that even charismatic actor couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander have to make do with crumbs, hidden under make-up and prosthetics. Hope begins very promisingly, as Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min), police chief of the town on which the film is named, is called by his cousin Sung ki (Zo In-sung) to investigate the sudden appearance of a dead and badly mutilated bull in the middle of a lane, amidst fields. Sung Ki has gathered his “boys”, that is other men with a lot of time and dubiously procured guns on their hands like him, anticipating that what they are looking at is a monster that will need hunting.

A decade after South Korean auteur Na Hong-jin took the world by storm with horror hit The Wailing, he returns with a demented monster movie. Hope premiered in Cannes Competition earlier this year, an audacious, eyebrow-raising outlier choice. Expectations are naturally immense. At its best, Hope is a thrilling demonstration of dynamite action filmmaking. But it’s also scraggly, unwieldy and prone to flat characterisation. Your experience will vary dramatically on certain expectations. As a big-scale apocalyptic outing, Hope is ambitious, frustrating, misjudged and yet genuinely surprising. That it can flit between so many things is in itself a total departure from the dead-eyed generic drudgery that hogs popular Hollywood blockbusters.