Cannes: "Hope" is Korea's Biggest Swing Yet Toward the Box Office Canon

by Elisa Giudici

There’s something genuinely startling about seeing the sprawling sci-fi epic Hope in Competition at Cannes. Not because genre films are unwelcome on the Croisette anymore; that battle has largely been wo. The surprise is that Na Hong-jin’s film embraces blockbuster language so wholeheartedly. This is not elevated horror masquerading as arthouse cinema, nor a restrained science-fiction allegory carefully calibrated for festival audiences. Hope is loud, enormous, messy, violent, and frequently exhilarating entertainment. It's a film with giant creatures, extended chase sequences, exploding buildings, machine guns, and a level of visual maximalism that feels almost aggressively unconcerned with prestige filmmaking etiquette...

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