Big budget Korean sci-fi thriller keeps you on the edge of your seat with some of the best action sequences in cinema throughout its lengthy runtime and odd story.

Duration: 156 minutes

Does a film actually need a good storyline to succeed? HOPE certainly makes you question it. Na Hong-jin, best known for directing 2016 horror film The Wailing, returns with a nearly 3-hour Korean sci-fi thriller that is simultaneously one of the most exhilarating action films in a long time, and one of the most frustratingly underwritten. Its characters are mostly static, its mythology feels half-baked, and several of its storylines seem to exist primarily as connective tissue between increasingly elaborate action sequences.

And yet, for all of that, this is one show you’ll have an utter blast watching, and constantly kept on the edge of your seat. There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about this film and the way it wants to throw its characters into an increasingly impossible situation, and then see just how much punishment they can take. Guns, monsters, explosions, horses, cars, grenades, aliens and an increasingly desperate group of villagers are all thrown into the mix, and Na directs it all with such confidence and visual flair that the flimsy story almost becomes beside the point.

Set in Hope Harbor, a small village near the Korean DMZ populated largely by elderly residents, the film initially plays like a mystery thriller. Police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is called to investigate the gruesomely mutilated carcass of a cow, while his second cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) and a group of local hunters follow a trail into the surrounding countryside. Reinforcements have been diverted to fight wildfires elsewhere and communication has been cut off, leaving the village almost entirely on its own when whatever has been stalking the countryside finally comes for them.

One of the film’s best decisions is how long it withholds the creature itself. We see the aftermath before we see the thing responsible: enormous wounds, destroyed buildings, bloodied bodies and increasingly inexplicable evidence that whatever is out there is far more dangerous than the supposed tiger or bear the villagers initially blame. That mystery makes the first half hour enormously tense, because the humans are constantly trying to understand something they are completely unequipped to fight.

Once the creature is revealed, HOPE essentially becomes an extended exercise in putting ordinary people against an enemy that is vastly stronger, faster and harder to kill than they are. The humans have guns, cars and horses; but the creatures have almost everything else going for them. What makes the action so effective is that Na understands exactly how to manipulate that imbalance. There are sweeping shots of the landscape as characters race on horseback, lengthy highway chases and frantic gunfights, but also much more claustrophobic sequences in the narrow streets and alleys of Hope Harbor, where the characters are forced to navigate a cramped environment while something monstrous tears through it around them.

The enemy is often just out of sight, or glimpsed in flashes, and the film repeatedly gives its characters a tiny sliver of hope before snatching it away. They make stupid decisions and you find yourself internally screaming at them; then, somehow, they pull off something that feels like a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. The gunfights never really get old because Na knows how much tension can come from something as simple as the split second it takes to reload, aiming and waiting for the right moment to fire, or watching a character realise they’re down to their last few shots. He also knows when to stop. Amid all the chaos are these wonderful moments of silence and trepidation, there is almost an intermission segment as they treat the wounded and gather more information before all hell breaks loose again.

The chase sequences in particular are spectacular. Na and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo seem to understand that there is an almost primal pleasure in watching a car fly through a landscape, and no matter how many times they execute a ridiculous drift turn, the camera swings around with it and you can’t help but live. You know it’s absurd and almost impractical, but that’s precisely the point. The film understands what an audience wants from a big-screen action sequence and gives it to you without embarrassment.

There are moments where you’re clenching your teeth, moments where you’re genuinely frightened, moments where the violence becomes so sudden and grotesque that you recoil, and moments where the entire cinema seems to react together. That is the best way to experience HOPE: sitting among an audience and hearing everyone gasp, laugh or cheer at the same time. It has the rare quality of making the cinema itself feel like a necessary part of the action, and you always find yourself rooting for them because their desperation is infectious. They’re hapless, they’re frequently outmatched, and they’re doing whatever they can to survive.

The Korean cast is a huge part of why this works. Hwang Jung-min is excellent as chief Bum-seok, initially presenting him as a stiff, no-nonsense police chief whose courage is less certain than his position suggests. You keep expecting him to become another casualty, but Hwang gradually reveals a man who may be frightened and angry, yet capable of pushing past that fear when it matters. There is something satisfying about watching him finally bust out the big guns after spending so much of the film trying to maintain control, only to inevitably lose his temper again during the downtime. Hoyeon is similarly terrific as rookie officer Sung-ae, bringing a physicality and ferocity to the role that makes her more than capable of holding her own amid all the male action heroes. Her Squid Game fame and obvious screen presence are almost beside the point; what matters is that she gets some genuinely great moments, from her long-awaited entrance, to some wonderfully explosive uses of grenades.

Zo In-sung’s Sung-ki, meanwhile, seems almost impossible to kill. He initially feels like exactly the sort of character who might be sacrificed to establish the threat, only to keep surviving one increasingly impossible ordeal after another, and eventually summons an inhuman strength and ability that are so on-the-nose, the other characters literally comment how capable he is, ‘almost like a movie star’. Eum Moon-suk and Lee Sang-hee also get to contribute to the mayhem, and even the older members of the cast are given their own split-second moments of badassery. There’s a real sense throughout that everyone is simply trying to survive, and that makes the ensemble surprisingly easy to root for even when the script gives them little emotional depth or backstory.

The humour is just as strange as the action. Na’s comic timing is incredibly offbeat, with some jokes feeling so dumb, awkward or scatological that they should completely destroy the tension. Instead, they often make the film even more entertaining. He’ll let a sequence of violence and suspense continue for long enough that you’re completely locked into it, then suddenly puncture the tension with some bizarrely bawdy exchange or offhand comment. It is crass, sometimes juvenile and occasionally so unexpected that you don’t quite know whether you’re supposed to laugh, but that’s exactly why it works. The humour gives HOPE an odd personality that prevents it from becoming a relentlessly grim creature feature. There is something almost gleeful about the way Na keeps throwing these increasingly ridiculous situations at his characters, and the film seems to understand that sometimes the funniest possible reaction to an apocalyptic nightmare is simply to make it even more ridiculous.

Unfortunately, the film’s biggest weakness is also its most obvious one: the special effects. The creature designs themselves are fantastic. They’re grotesque, unsettling and wonderfully uncanny, hovering somewhere between recognisably humanoid and completely alien. The sharp retractable talons, unhinged jaws and strangely human anatomy make them deeply unpleasant to look at, and the film does an excellent job of establishing their danger before we properly see them. The mystery surrounding those creatures, from the mutilated cow to increasingly disturbing discoveries in the forest, is one of the film’s strongest elements.

But once the aliens are fully revealed, the visual effects can be distractingly poor. They often look as though they’ve been composited into a different movie, which is particularly unfortunate given how gorgeous the live-action cinematography is. The discrepancy becomes impossible to ignore when the film has gone to the trouble of bringing in Hollywood stars like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell, only to obscure them beneath creature effects and give their characters relatively little to do or perform. Their involvement suggests an enormous international production, but from a viewer’s perspective, it can feel like a strange amount of star power being spent on characters who ultimately contribute very little beyond expanding the mythology and could honestly be played by anybody.

And the mythology is where the film really starts to lose audiences. For all the excitement of the action, HOPE doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with its story once the initial mystery has been solved. It introduces ideas, characters and potential plotlines that never quite receive satisfying conclusions, and the latter half increasingly feels like it is setting up a much larger story rather than completing the one we’re watching. Just when you think the film has reached its natural endpoint, Na raises the stakes again, introducing a much larger extraterrestrial conflict and a mythology involving alien families, spaceships and portals that feels almost comically disproportionate to the relatively intimate survival story with which the film began.

There is a part of you that will keep asking, “Why?” But another part that will keep answering, “Why not?” Because HOPE is clearly not as interested in constructing an airtight science-fiction mythology than it is in seeing how far it can escalate. It feels like Na simply doesn’t want the ride to end yet. The problem is that this leaves the film’s dramatic core feeling strangely incomplete, and while it works well enough as a standalone, there is an unmistakable sense that some of what we’re watching is intended to lay the groundwork for something else.

As such, HOPE ends up feeling like a strange viewing experience. For a filmmaker known for films with considerable thematic and psychological weight, this is almost startlingly light. There are hints of something deeper in the premise, with passing comments about this community isolated from the outside world full of suspicion about the North, ordinary people confronted with an unknowable threat, humans repeatedly turning on one another in the midst of catastrophe, but Na seems far more interested in spectacle than allegory. And maybe that’s enough, because the film focuses purely on being fun.

Often, it feels like the imagination of a young boy brought to life with the cinematic expertise of one of Korea’s most accomplished filmmakers: guns blazing, huge explosions, gripping car chases, monstrous extraterrestrial threats and badass heroes, all held together by a paper-thin story and the occasional joke that somehow lands exactly when it needs to. It is filmmaking with all restraint thrown out the window, and while that makes the story frustratingly thin, it also gives the film an infectious sense of freedom.

For 156 minutes, Na Hong-jin subjects these people to one disaster after another, constantly putting them in situations where survival seems impossible, and yet the characters keep getting back up. They keep reloading. They keep driving. They keep running. They keep fighting. The film may not give its story the resolution or depth it seems to promise, but it does leave you with the strange feeling that, against all reason, these people might actually make it. After all the blood, explosions, monsters and chaos, you leave the cinema feeling exhilarated rather than defeated. HOPE delivers something cinema can sometimes do better than anything else: unbridled, ridiculous, terrifying fun, experienced collectively with a room full of strangers flinching and cheering alongside you. And somewhere underneath all the carnage, there really is the hope that the cinema experience can and will live on through such films.

HOPE opens in Singapore cinemas such as Golden Village from 10th September.