While some critics felt this year’s Cannes Film Festival was filled with “safe” and predictable films, a shocking and controversial piece has finally woken up the night: Director Na Hong-jin’s ‘Hope’.
A truly great movie is one that makes you ask, “What on earth am I watching?” while being so captivating that you can’t look away. ‘Hope’ fits this description perfectly. It offers an overwhelming visual thrill, making viewers feel they are seeing something entirely new. We caught a glimpse of the film at the Lumiere Theatre in the Palais des Festivals, the main venue of the Cannes Film Festival, on the 17th (local time).
The story kicks off with Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and Seong-gi (Jo In-sung) sitting side-by-side in a car heading to a “scene.” Beom-seok is a police officer serving as the chief of the Hopo Port branch, and Seong-gi is a hunter from the small town of Hopo who reported a dead cow. As seen in the trailer, they arrive to find a dead ox.
The cow’s death was bizarre. Its skin was torn apart by sharp claws. The mystery deepens because the cow was brutally killed in the short hour that Seong-gi was out hunting. The claws were too large to be from a bear or a tiger. Beom-seok and Seong-gi realize that something inexplicable is happening.
As Beom-seok pursues the beast, things get even weirder. Commercial buildings are filled with holes as if something “plowed through” them, and screams echo from a distance. Beom-seok heads toward the city while Seong-gi searches the forest for the “thing.” Eventually, Beom-seok encounters a creature that defies explanation: nearly 4 meters tall, with massive claws and armor-like skin that is nearly impossible to cut. What exactly is this thing? Starting with this setup, the film pushes the audience to their limits for 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Director Na Hong-jin’s filmography has been a chronicle of human expressions during the search for a physical entity or the truth. This includes former detective Eom Joong-ho in ‘The Chaser’ searching for a killer in a chaotic world, Gu-nam in ‘The Yellow Sea’ drifting through a gray zone toward his goal, and Jong-gu in ‘The Wailing’ who circles the truth but is ultimately deceived by a truth he cannot understand.
The process of searching for the truth or the entity in ‘Hope’ is similar, but the cinematic language is different. Na Hong-jin has achieved something “beyond Na Hong-jin.” He experiments with genre shifts while delivering the message that “the truth is behind the door, but that truth is ugly, and because it is ugly, you may not even recognize it as the truth.”
In doing so, the director takes a new path. To put it simply, this film is impossible to categorize into a single genre. It starts as a mystery, thriller, and horror, then shifts into SF, transforms into a comedy, and eventually merges all these genres into one. During the screening at Cannes, many reactions were a mix of confusion (“What is that?”) and shivering terror (“No!”).
The title ‘Hope’ also prompts deep thought. Humans try to eliminate the “thing” for the sake of their own hope. However, the more they uncover the creature’s true nature, the more human hope is erased. Just when they believe they’ve eliminated it, the creatures reappear; the moment they are certain they’ve killed it, they charge again. When the audience realizes the creature isn’t a single entity but multiple, the hope they felt while cheering for its death vanishes. It is a world where neither the self nor others have hope, and there is no place for humans to feel secure.
However, ‘Hope’ is likely to be polarizing. While the blend of genres is the film’s greatest strength, some may find it excessive. Still, when considering whether there has ever been such an experimental Korean film, the answer is that there has been nothing like it before. By the end of the movie, one cannot help but ask, “What is the monster of this era?” The force that turns the places where communities live into ruins could be a dictator, politics, or civil war. In that sense, ‘Hope’ asks who the monster of our time is and encourages the audience to project their own situations and environments onto the screen. The results for ‘Hope,’ which is in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival, will be announced on the 24th (Korean time).
