Hope

Given its runtime, you expect Hope to ease you in. The opening looks like routine setup—meet police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), get a few characters on the board. That illusion lasts twenty seconds.

The first police call may involve a cow, but one look at the body makes it clear that Hope Harbor—a South Korean town near the demilitarized zone—is about to get hit with something gnarly. The locals have grown old and settled into a quiet frontier existence, their need for a real police force seemingly as much a relic as the weathered signs telling them to report spies and landmines. A few streets into his return to town, Bum-seok begins to suspect there’s some serious overtime in his future. Alas, his tour of the mounting catastrophes offers little clarity beyond the fact that, however many guys he’s going to need, it’s a whole fucking lot more than he brought.

For writer-director Na Hong-jin, the shotgun start is just how he lights a slow burn. The lion’s share of the film’s first hour unfolds under the overcast haze of a day persistently ninety minutes away from sundown. Answers accumulate slowly, and every fresh horror gets a full round of cast reactions before the camera lets us see what everyone’s looking at. It’s cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo’s own little Korean True Detective.

And we are fucking locked in.

It turns out the local octogenarians have a few more tricks—and automatic weapons—up their sleeves than Bum-seok realized. Between bursts of gunfire, they alternate between asking whether he knows how to use a big boy gun and whether he’s eaten. The man is being mothered by a militia.

As we near the end of the first hour, we get the title card fighters out of the locker room and headed towards the ring. In the red corner is our first monster—long hair, very grunge, and right up Bum-seok’s ass. In the blue corner is Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), the other half of the Hope Harbor police force and the baddest bitch in town. She pops right out of her own cruiser like she’s John McClane’s daddy and promptly blows that slimy punk rocker’s leg off with a grenade launcher.

Bum-seok may have lost track of every illegal gun in town, but the man knows how to hire.

Now my unwavering commitment to transparency requires a pause here amidst the fun. Is our first look at a monster entirely terrifying and not the least bit hokey? Absolutely not. We’re looking at a CGI Steven Tyler with bed head, covered in Nickelodeon slime, and being asked to shit ourselves on cue. Kids these days can generate a lifetime of therapy on the same laptops they use to cheat on homework. They’re going to have notes.

But conjuring a nightmare and choreographing a sustained fight with it are different assignments. Hope was made for a fraction of a blockbuster video game’s budget, and Na hasn’t tried to hide the seams behind editing so frantic that every kill becomes something we have to reconstruct from eyewitness testimony or three frustrating hours with the rewind button. We get to watch these creatures actually ambulate, then enjoy the extremely satisfying consequences of introducing them to Sung-ae while she’s pissed off.

I can live with Slime-n Tyler. Especially when I get to watch the leg come off.

With one down and none to go, the movie’s middle act downregulates to take a breather and bandage some cuts and scrapes. What a wild day, right?

Not so fast. Everyone not currently taking notes on a deeply regrettable anecdote about corking an asshole is uncovering fresh evidence that we’re nowhere near out of the woods. Several characters are, inconveniently, still in the actual woods.

From there, the Hope’s pacing leans more towards frantic and away from the vigilantly assembled tension that defined its virtuoso early buildup. The shift fits the dawning realization of just how fucked Hope Harbor really is. We’ve spent an hour wondering what could possibly have done all this. Now we get to worry about how much more it can do.

Remarkably, the escalation doesn’t make the effects any harder to forgive. The monsters switch from computer generated blurs to something more real, with warped humanoid anatomy and deeply unreasonable jaws. It would all look right at home in Prometheus.

Speaking of which, weren’t power couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander supposed to make an appearance in this thing? Oh well you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled to work that out.

For all its uneven digital flesh, Hope has the essential parts of a monster movie in working order. Na knows how to make you dread what’s around the corner, then make you cheer when somebody blows a piece off it. He’s populated his catastrophe with people whose worry for one another survives even as their little town becomes a fabulously unsafe place to express it—and none of that feeling gets lost in the subtitles.

It’s important to go through life with hope. Grandma just brought a machine gun and some snacks in case that shit doesn’t work.