Some uproarious rock’n’roll moviemaking from Korean director Na Hong-jin, a sci-fi action thriller mixing digital work with old-school analogue entertainment values, serving up a spectacle with cheeky touches of Spielberg, Walter Hill and one other director and movie franchise that it would be unsporting to specify at this stage.
We are in the remote and sleepy retirees’ town of Hope in South Korea near the demilitarised zone (DMZ), where people already constitutionally used to the possibility of war and bloodshed, are astonished to hear of a farm animal killed and mangled – though not for food – by an unidentified beast.
A careworn police chief, Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min) shows up to the lonely stretch of field where the eerily clawed carcass is lying and exchanges testy remarks with the local hunters, who offer their theories about a tiger while grumpily submitting to his comments about the legal status of their rifles.
It is a significant moment when the stunned Beom-seok removes his aviator-style sunglasses for a better look at this animal corpse, never to put them back on again. At this point he has surrendered his professional cool and detachment to become a warrior; much of this film consists of him and everyone else inexhaustibly running, shouting defiantly at the alien, and driving very fast, often executing juicy U-turns. The movie swiftly becomes a gonzo melee of car-chasing, alien-beast-battling craziness, which pauses very briefly after the nonstop rush of the first hour, shortly to resume. (I was betting with myself at what point in the hefty 160-minute running time we would get a good look at the monster, and got it roughly right.)
Beom-seok is joined in his colossal confrontation by gutsy rookie cop Sung-ae, enjoyably played by new K-megastar Jung Ho-yeon, from Netflix’s Squid Game, and a fiery local guy, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) who in the film’s final wacky stunt has to hang out of the back of a speeding cop car with his weapon, boldly allowing the creature to catch up sufficiently to get shot by him, while Sung-ae realises that she has fallen love with him – Sung-ki, that is, not the monster.
The movie ingeniously reveals that monsters have feelings too, and the local people’s desensitised aggression towards this existential outsider may have caused all the problems in the first place – a lesson there, perhaps, for everyone in the DMZ and beyond.
Opinions may be divided on the third-act reveal about what is behind this monstrous incursion, which appears to tee up a possible franchise continuation, and divided also on a particular sense of deja vu about how the monster looks. But there is some top-quality entertainment value on offer here from a movie which can only intensify the world’s K-obsession.
• Hope screened at the Cannes film festival
