Like many others, my friends and I often spend our time entertaining "what if" scenarios. What if a monster attacked right now? What if there were a zombie pandemic? What if an asteroid were to hit Earth? Over the years, we've made all kinds of plans. Some silly, some surprisingly thought out.
But here's the thing: like most people, my friends and I are dummies. In any one of these scenarios, we'd be hood ornaments within hours. The harsh reality is that these fantasies are fun with a safety net. They're an escape that helps us believe in an order to the world. A monster won't come, and there most likely won't be an asteroid in our lifetime.
Hope is the latest film from Na Hong-jin, who has kept us waiting for a decade since his tremendous The Wailing. It begins with a what-if scenario, albeit a far more grounded one than I presented, and quickly builds up pace.
In a remote mountain town called Hope, the local sheriff and a group of hunters discover a mutilated oxen on the road. Someone says there's a tiger in the area. Most of the minimal forces in the area are elsewhere fighting forest fires. But a tiger is a tiger, and it needs to be dealt with, especially if it's coming close to the town.
The group splits up, with the sheriff heading into town for backup, while the hunters head into the mountains to give chase. Then, very quickly, Hope escalates. The entire first act of the film is a near-unbroken action sequence that lasts for a full hour. It is a series of intense encounters that play like a mix between Jaws and The Host. Whatever attacked the cattle is in the town itself. Others have seen it, some have died, and a few have given chase. Meanwhile, in the mountains, the hunters come upon something else entirely.
To say anything more would be to spoil the fun, even if I believe there's nothing I can say that could truly describe what Hope is. This is audacious big-screen filmmaking at its most exhilarating. It must be seen to be believed, and even that might not be enough.
Hope's runtime is nearly three hours, and there is a period at the halfway mark where the film threatens to lose steam. It builds up one too many mysteries and red herrings that detract from the tightly wound first act and the breathtaking third. But just as I was about to lose my patience with it, director Hong-jin once more squeezes the throttle and doesn't let go until the end credits. If I said that I knew at any point where the story would go next, I'd be lying. What a thrill that is!
Hope is also completely uncaring about genre, which delights me to no end. It is at times tremendously scary, quite gory, but also full of slapstick and farce, and includes an extended sequence where an elderly man explains his bowel movements at length, which could be right out of a Stephen King novel.
Some will frown and explain why these detours don't work, and how these characters are simply loud archetypes. After the screening at Cannes, I heard many compare Hope unfavourably to Michael Bay's Transformers. I say they're missing the point. Hope earns its audacious tonal shifts because it cares so much about its characters.
Imagine a scenario where, instead of Quint, Brody, and Hooper, it were the drunk guys who clearly aren't the protagonists, who went after the shark. That's this movie. It's the what-if for all of us who have no business surviving one of these. I cared about every single one of these idiots because I could see myself, my friends, and my family in all of them. Like in The Host, they're imperfect people trying to make do.
In one of the most astounding moments of the film, Hong-jin dares to go from Dog Soldiers -style terror to a chase on horseback to a car chase to an extended riff on Buster Keaton's The General, and then all the way back to that first horseback chase. In hindsight, typing it out, it sounds cacophonous. It shouldn't work in the first place. Yet watching the sequence play out with meticulously staged stunts and immaculate camerawork, I couldn't help but be swept away by it all. It's the kind of epic filmmaking that makes going to the cinema worthwhile.
Hong-jin has already teased a potential sequel, but a part of me wishes this would remain a one-off. Hope ends on such a pitch-perfect note, one that feels intensely relatable to any ordinary schmoe in this day and age, where we all live in interesting times, whether we like it or not.
