HOPE is the new movie from the great South Korean director Na Hong-jin, his first since the horror movie THE WAILING nine years ago. Before that he did two really excellent, bleak crime movies, THE CHASER (2008) and THE YELLOW SEA (2010). This shows some of the detail, personality and mastery of those films, but it’s Na’s version of going into blockbuster mode – a big, action-packed monster movie. And though it shares some of the matter-of-fact horrors of his previous movies (it’s not the anti-septic death and destruction we’re used to from PG-13 Hollywood), it’s pleasant by comparison, because it’s very funny, and even a little warm at times. (Other times it’s mean as hell.)
Oddly, a movie it kept reminding me of was TREMORS, because it’s about the quirky residents of this small, rural area called Hope Harbor gathering their resources to deal with some crazy shit involving a monster. The lead is the police chief, Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, THE WAILING), who in the opening scene pulls up to the spot where some guys found a dead cow with giant claw marks on her. His second cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung, HUMINT) has gathered some of the boys and their hunting rifles – there’s a great running joke that Bum-seok keeps being surprised by how many illegal guns everybody has – and they tell him about sightings of a tiger in the area. He’s incredulous until they insist and tell him detailed stories about it, but later we find out they were just fucking with him. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE YELLOW SEA is a movie about desperation. In the zone between China, Russia and Korea a man named Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo, the killer from 
THE WAILING is a long, moody, unpredictable South Korean film about a terrible evil coming to a small fishing town in the mountains. The plot is fairly simple, there’s not that much to it, but I like how it takes you very gradually from naturalism to a bit of craziness.
