Hope

There’s nothing worse than watching your favourite new movie start to fall apart before your eyes. Especially if the filmmaker responsible has bone fides as strong as The Wailing’s Na Hong-jin, and the cast offers the off-the-wall prospect of Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander popping up in a K-horror epic. 

Because for a solid hour or so, the man behind that superlative 2016 supernatural horror, is playing another blinder. We’re back in remote small-town South Korea somewhere near the DMZ, where signs warn people to ‘beware of spies’ and paranoia comes with the territory. Except, it’s not spies to beware of but whatever is ripping chunks out of the local cattle and reducing the place to rubble. Welcome to the small harbour town of Hope (pop: mostly dead). 

In the spirit of all good creature features, Na keeps his monster under wraps for the entire opening reel. Instead, we follow tough-talking cop Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and no-nonsense local Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) as they head off in different directions to find out what’s been tearing the town apart. The set design is terrific. Bum-seok and his revolving cast of reluctant sidekicks tiptoe through the guts of shredded buildings and down dank alleys, while explosions billow in the near distance and cars are hurled over buildings. The introduction of a young deputy, Jung Ho-yeon (Jung Ho-yeon), complete with a cop car’s worth of heavy weaponry, is midnight movie heaven.

For a solid hour or so, Na Hong-jin plays a blinder

As they’re getting to grips with the hell-beast in town, Sung-ki and his posse of hunters head into the woods to face new threats, and Hope loses its way. Na struggles to stitch the two threads together, cross-cutting too rarely to maintain momentum and cohesion (it doesn’t help that the forest, filmed in Romania, feels disconnected with the Korean town). There’s some entertaining dialogue, including an old ginseng farmer who fills the cops in on his monster encounter in unnecessarily scatalogical detail, but the breakneck horse and car chase sequences, so great to start with, get repetitive. You’d struggle to explain who some of these characters are, and the creatures, rendered in cheap-looking VFX, don’t make a lot more sense either.

And Fassbender and Vikander? Without spoiling it, they’re here in a mo-cap capacity to help articulate the half-baked mythology Na suddenly foists on his monsters. The ending – if you can call it that, because everything is left hanging – is a head-scratcher. A strange beast, then: great when it’s being Predator or Tremors; rotten when it turns into Prometheus. 

Hope premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.