There are so few foreign films shown in Birmingham that I grab every opportunity. That was my only reason to see HOPE (Na Hong-jin, 2026), even though I didn’t know the director or cast, and in spite of the film being over 2h30 long. I found it a bit prosaic at first. A chief of police (Hwang Jung-min) is sent on a call in a village near the Demilitarised Zone by North Korea. A cow has been mangled. What has such large claws? Could it be a tiger? No, it turns out to aliens.
The first makes its appearance almost forty minutes into the film, and from then it’s non-stop action, shootings from cars, horses, in the town and in the forest. The aliens can leap into trees so they can literally chase the earthlings from any direction. It all had me on the edge of my seat and was exciting to watch. I loved the design and look of the monsters, which are sometimes CGI’d and sometimes old-fashioned puppets. The film has a retro feel made contemporary with the crudity of its humour and with the speed and inventiveness of its action; a key type of shot is where the camera follows a speeding car or horse which ends up turning in one direction as the camera goes in the opposite one, creating a feeling of frenzied distance.
An hour into the film, during a frantic car chase, the police chief notices that the alien is crying, and that shifts the narrative. Why is he crying? It turns out there are more of them — we’ll eventually see six – and that a hick would-be militia-man has killed what looks to be a child. Is that the reason for the tears and the franticness that has led to the destruction of the village and the killing of people?
At this moment the aliens become individuals too rather than concepts, the chases and shootings take on a different tone – they’re now killing people not things, and when Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender appear near the end as the aliens, who can speak to each other, and who’s speech is sub-titled for us, the film changes direction completely, ready to take us on another journey, which presumably is the sequel. I was a bit iffy at first, the set-up made worse by the rotten projection at Cineworld, with half the sub-titles being off-screen and the image lacking in necessary luminescence, but the film won me over by the end and I now hope there is a sequel.
I see that some critics have been using the term gonzo in relation to the film, which I frankly don’t get. Some of the humour is crude, the chase scenes are inventive, the special effects are sometimes basic but always effective…but there’s nothing gonzo about it in at least my understanding of the term. Ostensibly, South Korea’s most expensive production.
José Arroyo
