No film in Cannes’s official competition has featured quite so many beheadings and decapitations as Hope. Na Hong-jin’s eagerly awaited sci-fi horror epic arrives burdened by immense expectations after The Wailing, and it largely delivers. Well, for the first hour.
Set in the backwater town of the title, adjacent to South Korea’s landmined militarised zone, this relentless horror-comedy follows a bumbling local police chief (Hwang Jung-min) tested by a mysterious creature that unleashes the kind of chaos one might expect from Predator on crack.
Na stages the opening hour with astonishing energy and precision, blending monster-movie thrills, car chases, slapstick comedy and muscular action choreography into a wildly entertaining spectacle. The arrival of Squid Game’s Jung Ho-yeon, armed to the teeth, sent the Cannes crowd wild.
Hong Kyung-pyo’s fast-paced cinematography and the film’s tactile practical effects give the carnage weight, so long as the monster remains an unseen presence, known only by ruined buildings, hurtling humans and extravagant gore.
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The film struggles once its creatures are fully revealed. The CGI aliens, played by Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell, look distractingly artificial. The unreal sun similarly never moves in the digital sky.
A corpulent 160-minute run time, unnecessary mythology and thinly sketched supporting characters further sap momentum. The dialogue is composed almost entirely of swear words.
Though the final act regains some manic energy with ambitious, large-scale action, the composer Michael Abels’s relentless strings, overly extended gunplay and an unkillable creature become exhausting. And that’s before we are promised a sequel. It’s fun. But make the fun stop.
