TIFF 51: “Hope” delivers a blast of Midnight Madness

by Cláudio Alves

Though the 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (and Market, the organizers would like to remind you) opens officially tomorrow, a special screening kicked off the festivities tonight. Coinciding with its stateside release, the widest for any Korean film since Parasite, Na Hong-jin’s Hope was shown as an honorary part of this year’s Midnight Madness selection. The NEON blockbuster wannabe caused quite the stir at Cannes, the rare genre movie to play in competition. Back at the Croisette, our own Elisa Giudici was impressed by the boldness of Na’s direction despite finding many faults in Hope. That’s something that the jury, presided by Park Chan-wook, might have felt, too, considering the production left Cannes empty-handed - no awards for Na. 

Alas, I am much more enamored of the director’s vision and overall film than our Italian correspondent, and think it's a perfect fit for TIFF’s Midnight Madness crowd. There’s no shortage of madness on display, that’s for sure...

Under the opening credits, nocturnal blues give way to a painterly dawn as the camera flies over mountains and looks seaward, to the little town of Hope Harbor, near the border between South and North Korea. This shall be the only moment of peace in a 160-minute uncategorizable epic that barely gives you any chance to breathe, so better enjoy the placidity of these landscape shots and get ready for what’s coming. Because, by morning, a scene familiar to any fan of Na Hong-jin is underway, as an incompetent police officer joins a bunch of union guys armed to their teeth as they examine a most mysterious sight. 

In the middle of nowhere, between vast empty fields and shambolic farms, the road is blocked by a dead bull. That shouldn't be cause for alarm under normal circumstances, but these are not normal circumstances. The carcass has been attacked by something of immense size, something that could be a tiger that made it across Siberia and North Korea, but that feels improbable. Stranger still, no part of the animal has been consumed. More carnage awaits in a nearby home, dead cows and a strange smell of fish, not to mention the dismembered arm of the bovine’s former owner. Whatever killed the cattle might not have a taste for beef, but they seem to have no such qualms about human flesh. 

Throughout this enigmatic introduction, Na highlights the paranoia of those living by the border between Koreas, with warnings of spies and minefields everywhere. Wild animals seem to be the least of the community’s concerns. The old guard who still remember the Korean War and its aftermath in some capacity are the most paranoid of all. They might also be the ones most prepared for what’s to come. Then again, maybe not. Ko Bum-seok, our officer protagonist, inevitably crosses paths with their elderly militia when he splits from the other men and heads to the village while his earlier, civilian companions go deep into the woods.

If, so far, Na has been showing off a classicist style with a lean toward the tonally bizarre, Hope’s formalist grammar is about to change. The bull was almost framed like the corpse in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, weaponized for morbid farce, and the forest footage has a romanticism that recalls classic Westerns and their influence on midcentury Asian cinema. What’s waiting for Ko in Hope Harbor is nothing of the sort. The village is under attack by some yet-unseen monstrosity and, suddenly, the camera's perception of the bumbling policeman aligns more with first-person-shooter visual idioms than Old Hollywood or even Korean New Wave traditions.

And yet, this videogame aesthetic, all Steadycam stalking across the smoldering ruins, doesn’t impede some more genre and register mashing. As Ko, Hwang Jung-min plays the sequence with old-school slapstick antics – enhanced by a uniform tailored for awkwardness with its too-fitted leather jacket and flared pants –  rather than action hero stoicism. His clownery frames the carnage as something fundamentally enmeshed with the darkest dark humor, without denying Na’s earnestness. It goes beyond the gallows, for the Harbor has become an open-air slaughterhouse, becoming more open by the second as an increasing number of buildings fall apart or have holes driven through them by the monster. 

Once the creature is revealed, these audiovisual strategies shift again, leaning into horror and action with more traditional blockbuster stylings. The subtle metamorphosis in style coincides, almost instantly, with the arrival of Jung Ho-yeon’s Im Sung-ae, a rookie cop and makeshift nurse who’s probably the most capable authority figure in any of the director’s films. Hell, gaze upon her fierce handling of the situation, and you might recall Linda Hamilton’s hardened heroism in the Terminator sequel or, perchance, the should-have-won-the-Oscar-wasn’t-even-nominated Angela Bassett in Strange Days. She brings the fire and the slow-motion… maybe too much of the latter.

Hope should be seen fresh and with an open mind, so I’ll try to stop with the specificities of plot here. Tone and theme and craft, however? There’s still plenty to discuss on those fronts. Regarding the last of the three, Na proves himself one of the few directors working at such scale today who uses the widescreen with compositional purpose, deep-focus staging galore, and an understanding of camera movement as a dramaturgical tool. But aren’t the effects bad, you may ask? That’s what everyone’s been saying since the film first screened in May. Much vitriol’s been spilled describing the picture’s CGI, with comparisons to archaic PS2 renders littered through many of the more dismissive Cannes dispatches.

Maybe I’m just too accustomed to films like Hideaki Anno’s live-action misadventures or too tired of Hollywood photorealist standards to be bothered by it. But who cares about flawless digital verisimilitude when the effects have such personality, variety, sheer inventiveness? Indeed, personality is key here, because it sparks recognition and shifts the characters' and audience’s understanding of the emotional stakes at hand. Nothing could make one forget the extreme violence the villagers suffered, as Hope remains a gorefest of uncommon brutality, but there are points at which that violence acquires different dimensions.

After all, something that should be sacrosanct has been violated before the film even starts, the echoes of that transgression reverberating through what amounts to a feature-length chase scene, ending in a cataclysm that cuts in all directions. Given that this is a human value many in the real world seem to have chosen to ignore lately, it hits especially hard how criminal it is in Hope’s emotional cosmos. When the familiar and the unknowable are so deeply interwoven as they are here, these reckonings with an off-screen reality can feel like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus, or perhaps the tackle of an angel-like creature, made of marble flesh and dead branches and righteous anger.

But before we reach that sense of universal tragedy, where the definitions of monstrousness blur and boundaries are unmade, Hope can also be quite ridiculous and even banal. There’s a Fordian dissonance with some of its humor, best embodied by two older gentlemen who are put through the grinder in that forest of a thousand dangers, one of them providing plenty of scatological shocks in his storytelling - long live bad taste! Another character could have been the psychopath villain of a more traditional procedural, yet is here reduced to someone both pivotal yet ultimately secondary. His entire existence feels like a nasty joke, more lacerating than the slash of a monster’s claw.

Back to that aforementioned banality, it’s brilliantly realized across the board, often breaking the bristling pace with rituals of shared food or a pause to drink water, the body’s needs and communal togetherness shining through a sci-fi/horror/western/action movie apparatus. Yes, Hope is maybe too long for some, but I was never bored. Important, too, is that the material's resistance to efficiency is part and parcel of what makes the movie feel so special. The repetition in narrative beats does not correspond to a repetition in formal solutions or delights, nor to never-changing ideas going around in circles. In fact, the more a certain scenario is played out, the more readings Na solicits from the viewer.

The same circumstances and behavioral patterns restaged ad nauseam may invoke the visceral and the divine and everything in between, transforming the instinct of terror into schadenfreude-fueled comedy and then awe, back again and reverse. It happens in gradual fashion through a cinematic experience that risks exhaustion. One almost wants it to slow down and run longer, less briskly, so elements like the specific use of Hollywood actors can be considered within the political framework invoked by the border politics so signaled in the first act and the wrinkled ghosts of the Korean War. One wants to linger with these notions, but there’s both no time and too much time to do it.

Either way, the result is one of the most spectacular creations of mainstream cinema circa 2026. It reminded me of how I felt last year, watching Avatar: Fire and Ash deliver its mélange of technical bravado and thorny entanglement of ideas, spanning from the biblical to the post-colonial. And like James Cameron’s Avatar saga, Hope is begging for a sequel. It’s built for one, its ending a deliberate inconclusion that had me squirming in my seat. Give me the rest of the story now! Even if it overexplains what should remain enigmatic. Even if it overcomplicates what should remain as simple as a fable. In Na, we trust, and, at this point, I’d follow him anywhere, including the Princess Mononoke-esque alien invasion epic cum Greek Tragedy he seems to be hinting at with Hope’s final heartbeats.

Don’t miss Hope while it plays in theaterse. It deserves the grandeur of the big screen. Also, don’t miss our TIFF coverage!