HOPE
(Check out Anders Ljung’s Hope movie review, it’s in theaters now. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
There is a moment somewhere within the relentless carnage of Na Hong jin’s Hope when the human body seems to lose any meaningful relationship to physics. People fly. They tumble. They are launched across rooms and streets with the weightlessness of crash test dummies, slammed into objects with a violence that should be horrifying but becomes, through sheer exaggeration, inexplicably funny. It is perhaps the defining contradiction of Hope, a film made with extraordinary technical precision that frequently behaves like an extraordinarily expensive live action cartoon.
Nearly a decade after The Wailing, Na returns with a film operating on an entirely different scale. What begins as an increasingly strange series of events surrounding a remote community gradually expands into something enormous, pulling its characters into a situation they can neither understand nor reasonably control. It is science fiction built around people who remain hilariously and disastrously incapable of comprehending the scale of the situation they have entered.
Na has always been interested in the terror produced by incomplete information. The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, and especially The Wailing thrive on characters desperately attempting to interpret situations that remain several steps ahead of them. Hope maintains that anxiety even as Na exchanges the comparatively intimate scale of his earlier work for explosions, creatures, gunfire, collapsing structures, and extended chase sequences. The genre has changed, but his characters have not. They are still frightened people trying to make rational decisions with catastrophically insufficient information.
That familiar dramatic instinct gives Hope an unusual advantage as a spectacle. There is genuine vulnerability within the action because its central performances never comfortably transform into those of conventional action heroes. Fear does not disappear once weapons are introduced. Instead, it becomes the defining characteristic of the performances. These are people constantly aware, or at least increasingly suspicious, that they are standing inches away from some devastating fate. Their faces register the impossible circumstances around them with enough sincerity that even the film’s most ridiculous moments retain a strange sense of danger.
Na translates that vulnerability into some astonishing action filmmaking. Long tracking shots race alongside characters who can hear destruction occurring before they can see it. The camera barrels through streets, interiors, and wilderness while explosions and screams announce threats somewhere beyond the frame. Rather than granting us the omniscience typically associated with blockbuster filmmaking, Hope frequently traps the audience at the same perceptual disadvantage as its characters. We know something is coming. We simply do not know from where.
When the film does finally explode into spectacle, there is something almost nostalgic about its visual ambition. Hope recalls the best qualities of effects driven blockbusters of the late 2000s and early 2010s, when computer generated imagery was frequently deployed not merely to place an object into a frame but to make the frame itself feel impossible. There is a muscularity to the action that recalls an era when massive science fiction films were allowed to be overwhelming, messy, and almost obnoxiously committed to scale.
More importantly, the imagery has weight. Vehicles collide, bodies tumble, trees splinter, and buildings rupture. Even when the effects reveal their artificiality, there is a physical imagination behind them. Hope understands spectacle as movement rather than decoration. The pleasure is not simply seeing something impossible rendered convincingly. It is watching an entire environment react to its presence.
And then everyone starts flying around like ragdolls.
This is where Hope becomes considerably stranger than the prestigious science fiction epic its scale initially suggests. Na continually allows absurdity to infect the conventional grammar of the action movie. Characters fall too far, crash too violently, or are thrown with such ridiculous velocity that the violence crosses an invisible boundary between frightening and hilarious. Bodies possess the physics of objects in a video game after something has gone slightly wrong. A human being hits something, rebounds, folds, and somehow keeps going.
The result should destroy the tension. Somehow, it rarely does.
Instead, Hope occupies a bizarre space in which mortal terror and slapstick become mutually reinforcing. There is something inherently ridiculous about the action hero’s body. Hollywood has spent decades asking audiences to accept people surviving crashes, explosions, falls, and impacts that should instantly kill them. Hope accepts that premise and pushes it slightly further, until the human body becomes an absurd little projectile caught within forces it cannot possibly control.
That distinction is essential because Na does not seem interested in mocking the blockbuster from a position of superiority. He clearly loves this stuff. The chases are too carefully designed, the destruction too exhilarating, and the scale too lovingly excessive. Hope simultaneously indulges in the pleasures of an enormous action movie and recognizes how fundamentally stupid those pleasures can be.
This combination is what makes the film so mind numbing in the most complimentary sense. It possesses the craftsmanship of great science fiction while embracing the physics of pure nonsense. One moment can contain a genuinely frightening performance, an astonishing visual effect, and a body being launched through space with the elegance of a tossed sock. Somehow, none of these elements cancel one another out.
Beneath all of that chaos remains the filmmaker responsible for The Wailing. Na understands that fear does not necessarily emerge from what a character sees, but from the terrifying distance between what they see and what they understand. The scale may have changed dramatically, yet the fundamental anxiety remains intact. His characters are surrounded by evidence of something impossible and remain painfully human in their attempts to make sense of it.
Hope is enormous, frightening, technically impressive, and frequently very funny. It combines some of the finest qualities of modern science fiction spectacle with the delirious physical logic of a ragdoll simulator. That should be an impossible tonal balance. In Na’s hands, it becomes the film’s greatest pleasure. Hope does not ask its audience to choose between terror and absurdity. It recognizes that when the world becomes sufficiently incomprehensible, the two might actually be the same thing.
– Anders Ljung
