Hope

Here lies Hope, a seaside Korean village nestled between the mountains on the southern side of the DMZ. In a community ever watchful for a ground invasion from the North, the discovery of mutilated livestock sparks a two-pronged investigation led by a beleaguered police chief, Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min), and his wilful cousin, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung). As nearby wildfires soon sever communication across the countryside, Beom-seok rushes back to defend his largely elderly constituency with his eager deputy (Hoyeon), and Sung-ki musters a hunting party to venture into the surrounding wilderness and root out the threat. Both are in for a rude and wicked awakening of monstrous proportions (portrayed in part by Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander).

As he bounds between suspense and spectacle, in a marathon of breathless set pieces, writer-director Na Hong-jin conducts the subsequent escalating chaos with a feverish zeal that seems to epitomize the whole history of action cinema, from Buster Keaton to Bong Joon Ho. At first recalling the small-town terror of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, as well as its inspired derivatives like Jordan Peele’s Nope, Na further accrues a rollicking momentum with the elasticity of a Tex Avery cartoon or Hideki Kamiya video game as he propels his hayseed protagonists through a crucible of harrowing and hilarious daring do and dumb. And when all his enigmatic cards are finally turned over in a series of revelations, both sobering (and scatological), an epic tragedy finally emerges, but one whose semi-parodic connotations rocket to cosmic heights.All ye who enter: hold on to your butts.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: explicit violence, animal abuse, accident trauma, coarse language, crude content, mature themes, scenes of surgery