"Hope" : Na Hong-jin wows the Cannes Film Festival with an action film in the form of an extraterrestrial farce

Na Hong-jin was eagerly awaited this year on the Croisette. The South Korean director is a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, where all his films since his debut have been presented. He came for the first time in 2008, in Midnight Screening, with his first feature film, The Chasera high-tension thriller that brings him into the realm of South Korean cinema made popular by directors like Park Chan-wook, the president of the jury for this edition, or Bong Joon-ho.

He followed it up three years later with The Murdererin the Un certain regard selection, then returns a third time with his third film in 2016, The Strangers, présenté Hors compétitiona horror thriller. It is as a cult filmmaker and major figure in genre cinema that Na Hong-jin returns to Cannes, this time in competition, with Hopea plural genre film, presented on Sunday May 17 in the evening.

In a small port town, the police discover the body of an ox in the middle of a country road. The bovine appears to have been attacked by a ferocious beast. What predator could have left such impressive claw marks and abandoned its prey without devouring it? Where did this come from? creature? The hunters who discovered the ox speak of the visit of a tiger, coming from the North, but how could it have crossed the mine fields, passed the barbed wire? What the policeman and the hunters will discover when they arrive at the port goes beyond anything they could have imagined. Then begins a chase which will only stop once the end credits have started.

The South Korean director once again demonstrates his virtuosity. In a film which runs almost without interruption for 2 hours 40 minutes of chases, by car, on foot, in a van, on horseback, in town, on country roads, in the forest. In landscapes littered with dismembered corpses, bathed in blood, and upside down settings, we follow a valiant policeman, armed with a band of hunters armed to the teeth, and an assistant as skilled at the wheel, as at shooting with heavy weapons, as at nursing, as at swearing.

The director deploys his staging in a riot of movements, tracking shots hovering or at ground level, high angle, low angle, cropping, and very beautiful lighting. The result is both hyperaesthetic and spectacular, and provokes, as the genre demands, shivers and cold sweats.

But the South Korean director doesn’t stop there. With crazy dialogues, which seem to come from the mouths of children trying to scare each other, he gives a totally offbeat tone to his film. “You’re too strong, are you an actor?”asks the policewoman in the middle of the stunt scene. “It’s terrible, it can’t be true!”… Na Hong-jin thus shifts the subject by creating complicity with his audience, who are delighted with the show.

Even if the film is both funny and spectacular, we end up wanting to get off the ride when we learn about this story of aliens who we don’t quite understand what they came to do there, unless they are the incarnation of this omnipresent threat coming from the North…

Titre original : “Hopeu”
Genre : Action, Science Fiction, Thriller
Réalisation : Na Hong-jin
With : Jung-Min Hwang, In-sung Zo, Jung Ho-Yeon
Pays : South Korea
Durée: 2h40
Sortie : Coming soon in theaters
Synopsis : A mysterious discovery is made near the port city of Hopo Port. The inhabitants are fighting for their survival…