I have seen reviews of Hope bewildered by its third act, confused as to how the competent action movie they were enjoying could culminate in such an awful conclusion. Why did director Na Hong-jin botch the landing? Is he stupid? No. The bad ending is the point. It’s satire and Na is trolling the audience for fun.
Hope is being sold as typical sci-fi action fare from a Korean master of suspense because the studios don’t want to admit that he played an expensive joke on them and they’re desperate to make their production costs back. Or they’re in on the joke and happy to go along with the deception that is the first couple acts of Na’s film. Maybe a bit of both. Whatever gets butts in seats.
At ₩100 billion won—roughly $74 million—this is the most expensive Korean movie ever produced, and it seems Na has intentionally mocked spending so much money on a sci-fi blockbuster franchise by burning the cash while hinting at a sequel he has no interest in making.
It’s as if he’s saying, “Oh you want to hire me, an actual artist, to make an expensive mainstream sci-fi action slop franchise for you? For stupid American hogs? Sure, I’d love to.“
Na is a talented director, and plays the story of a small town attacked by a monster perfectly straight at first. The townsfolk unite to hunt it down, but there’s something even more mysterious in the woods, a spooky mystery is afoot! You may or may not see him beginning to dissect genre tropes depending on what you’re expecting going into the theater, but what he’s doing becomes clearer the closer you get to the end.
Na’s scripts have always been deeply cynical, particularly in their resolutions—the pimp tracks down the serial killer, but not before his sex worker is murdered (The Chaser) the debtor pays off his liability by completing the assassination, but bleeds to death before finding his missing wife (The Yellow Sea), the policeman identifies the demon possessing his daughter, but is tricked by it into suspecting another and killed by her (The Wailing). Hope is so cynical that the conclusion itself becomes the punchline to a dry, two-and-a-half hour joke. Everyone in the theater either started laughing or got really pissed off. Some of those laughing seemed in on the joke, other laughers thought Na did a comically bad job, and the angry people agreed with them.
The film starts ordinarily enough with Na’s typical bumbling police characters, tense editing, ultraviolence, and plot signposts pointing to a satisfying conclusion Hope never delivers. By the end, you realize this movie about a fishing village is full of red herrings, and the troll onscreen isn’t the biggest one in the theater with you.
The studios calling in a critically successful genre director to make a lucrative mainstream sci-fi epic is a trend that’s only gotten worse in recent years. Those movies often turn out pretty bad (Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, Chloe Zhao’s The Eternals), and Na is at least willing to shoot his own dog. Rian Johnson getting dragged in to try to salvage Disney’s botched Star Wars reboot comes to mind, and at the very least, Na will hopefully make Hope’s budget back and be similarly rewarded with the creative freedom to make his little detective movies. He’s too good for blockbuster schlock and Hope is him showing us.
Many directors have spited studio heads and audiences to make a point. This isn’t William Friedkin or Michael Cimino breaking the bank with Sorcerer and Days of Heaven and fighting the studio on an ultimately good movie sold poorly to audiences. This is Tom Green getting hired to make a mainstream comedy by executives who don’t understand his humor and delivering, to their horror, the anti-art Freddy Got Fingered. Hope’s self-destructive third act meta-narrative owes more to Alex Cox’s in Walker than a failure to deliver on Na’s part.
If you want a more stereotypical Korean action horror film you should see Colony instead, it’s in theaters now too, and directed by Yeon Sang-ho, the reliable mainstream genre man who made Train to Busan. If you’ve seen Na’s previous films and are looking for something more in line with them than this satire, try The Medium, which he co-wrote and produced. If you want to see a director at the height of his powers thumb his nose at Independence Day so he can piss off clueless consumers and executives, see Hope.