The good, the bad, the weird: "Hope"

In one go, you can see exactly why Na Hong-jin's Hope was snapped up by boutique studio Neon at Cannes this year, why it didn't win any prizes there, and why it hasn't exactly set the Western box office alight in recent weeks, as its distributor surely hoped. This is a subtitled Korean action fantasy constructed on modern Hollywood lines, the business of a pulpy B-movie drawn out to a length (160 minutes) more commonly associated with Memories of Murder-like artistic statements, topped with a coda setting up sequels that may or may not now follow. (Everybody wants a money-spinning universe, before they've determined whether there's an audience out there.) Previously a purveyor of much-exported, much-cheered genre items (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, The Wailing), Na is pushing on into bigger-picture, potential blockbuster territory here: such expansiveness is clear from Hope's prologue, which spends a leisurely ten-to-fifteen minutes determining that we're on the outskirts of a small bordertown, where intemperate police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and a huddle of concerned citizens with hunting rifles have congregated over the carcass of a recently mauled heifer. Dead livestock will prove the least of this group's problems, as the following two hours turn up human limbs hanging limply from trees, holes blown through local real estate, and a pack of feral monsters revealed to be aliens on a tear. (With, it turns out, good reason.) We get the pulp, the blood, the gore, thrills both cheap and nasty, plus bonus flickers of genuine event-movie artistry. But as early as that prologue, we're also getting plenty of bluster, waffle, hot air, wrong turns and dead ends. For better and worse, Na remains one of those incorrigible auteurs who take not the slightest bit of notice of even their most trusted producers' notes; Hope, accordingly, turns out to be something like the Tristram Shandy of monster movies.

Both the maximalism and the waywardness here were built-in. Rather than seek out a choice handful of shooting locations, Na appears to have commandeered an entire town for several weeks, shaken its properties around by the ankles, and emptied their contents out onto the streets before him. The movie is a masterpiece of production and art design, countering the minimalism of a Backrooms with the chaotically dishevelled sightlines of a garage sale: one alternative title would be Front Yards. (Everything must go.) That roominess has encouraged Na to start showboating: he, too, is in salesman mode here. He directs in pauses for audience gasps and laughter; a scene where two characters count to three and still do nothing; a mid-film lunch break; a long postmortem; and an even longer monologue about pooing. Throughout, he keeps bringing on turns who bicker, bumble, fumble, stumble and fall over; it takes these variably dimwitted folks a good ten minutes longer than us to reach the same conclusions, which means we spend much of the running time waiting around for them to catch up. In Memories of Murder, that comprehension lag served a narrative purpose: it told us something about the unreliability of the authorities working the case. Here, however, it just plays as a consequence of a well-placed filmmaker taking an opportunity to goof off. There are certainly reasons for Na to delay showing the film's monsters: when they're finally tracked down, they're revealed as sloppy old things, resembling aggrieved ragdolls or rejected Iron Maiden cover art. These aggressors port across some of the ferocity of Na's earlier work - they're certainly more frenzied than, say, Mark Ruffalo's mo-cap Hulk - but they also pitch us into yet another conflict between humans and visual effects; much of the first hour feels like watching somebody else play a videogame, much of the second is live-action cartoon, with the principals being bounced repeatedly off trees at high velocity without incurring harm, and then it's back to videogames again for the inconclusive wrap-up. Parasite crossed over because it was doing something Hollywood, in its current iteration, couldn't: craft a Marxist parable within a distinctively Korean idiom. (It felt both radical and a discovery, even before we considered the excellence of its storytelling.) Nothing in Hope dispels the notion Na is a capable engineer of baroque shaggy-dog stories, but equally nothing goes too far beyond one of the better made MCU instalments: the movie is, finally, just a bloodier variant of that spectacle Hollywood has been pumping out every three months for the past eighteen years. Rightly or wrongly, in this case, audiences have decided to shop local.

Hope is now showing in selected cinemas.