Courtesy Neon
Alfred Hitchcock famously said of crafting suspense, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” That bit of wisdom has informed generations of filmmakers across genres. It’s part of the reason you don’t see the shark in Jaws until 81 minutes into a two-hour film. What we can imagine is often scarier than what we end up seeing, and the best filmmakers know that the longer you drag out the mystery, the more suspenseful it gets.
Of course, the other possibility is that if you drag out a reveal for long enough, and the monster in question turns out to be only slightly better looking than something from The Lawnmower Man, the entire movie falls apart. That’s the losing gamble writer-director Na Hong-jin ultimately makes with Hope.
For its first hour, Hope is a taut, surprisingly funny monster-mystery that plays like the Korean version of Tremors. In a rural South Korean coastal town, local police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) witnesses bizarrely escalating destruction and violence after he’s called by his cousin Sung Ki (Zo In-sung) and his hunting buddies to check out a mutilated dead cow plopped in the middle of a road.
What first seems like a wild animal attack is part of a string of terrifying occurrences. Most of the town’s main street has been destroyed by some unknown creature with incredible strength—strong enough to pancake a human being against a wall Looney Tunes-style by throwing a dumpster at them. Whatever this being is, it’s also fast, able to book it across town in a matter of seconds, constantly staying just far enough out of Bum-seok’s line of sight that he can’t get a good look.
There’s great tension in these early scenes, which switch between Bum-seok wandering the streets and occasionally partnering up with the town’s surprisingly well-armed populace, and Sung Ki and his pals investigating a disturbance in the woods. The film strikes a good balance of character-based humor and growing menace.
It’s augmented by gorgeous cinematography from Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite, Snowpiercer and Burning) that captures the sweeping natural beauty (and creepy shadows) of the setting, and a typically evocative score by Nope’s Michael Abels.
Then, just as the mystery is reaching a crescendo, Na shows us what’s causing all the trouble, and it’s not even close to worth the wait.
Courtesy Neon
I won’t get into specifics for spoiler reasons, but suffice it to say that the rudimentary nature of the creature(s) in question, and the herky-jerky Video Toaster-esque CGI movement, isn’t the only thing that takes Hope down several pegs from “incredibly promising” to “ambitious oddity.” The real problem is that after the monster reveal, Hope reveals itself to be a different movie entirely, one significantly less interesting than the movie it’s been up to that point.
Na and crew still have some cool tricks up their sleeves after the monster shows its face. Impressive stunts and practical effects carry through to the final moments, with some of them having audience members at my screening justifiably leaning out of their seats, jaws agape. There are jokes set up in the first act that pay off delightfully in the third. The unexpected relationships the characters forge create a ramshackle bond with the audience that makes it easy to get genuinely invested when the stakes are high.
Hope’s many strengths are human-based and practical, which only highlights how lame its very obvious, digitally based main threat is. That letdown only intensifies when it becomes abundantly clear that this threat, and the tired storytelling trope it stems from, is the real focus of the film.
Hope starts great, plays itself into a corner, and then reveals it has no creative way to get out of that corner. Its highs are worth witnessing for yourself, but the lows (and its 160-minute runtime) make it tough to recommend wholeheartedly.