Cinema and monsters are a recipe as old as cinema itself. Long before Jaws (1975) turned monsters on celluloid into modern machines for generating blockbusters, cinema had already terrified audiences with an entire legion of grotesque creatures. King Kong, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Nosferatu, The Golem… the stuff nightmares are made of has always found fertile ground on the big screen. Hope, the new film from Korean director Na Hong-jin, reminds us that this old formula remains just as effective today as it was a hundred years ago.

It has been ten years since Na Hong-jin last released a film as both director and screenwriter. In 2016, he gave the world The Wailing, in my opinion one of the best horror films of the last twenty years. In this new effort, he takes us to a small coastal town in South Korea. The discovery of a mutilated animal sets off an alarm in the small community, and the local police chief, together with a group of men, attempts to understand what kind of creature could have caused such devastation. The unknown threat soon develops into a conflict that puts the lives of every inhabitant at risk.

In Hope, we have a film that fully embraces genre filmmaking to construct a frenetic narrative driven by wonderful editing and impeccable staging. The director uses every cliché and convention of monster movies, action films, and science fiction to build an effective parody that works both as a tragic comedy and as a high-level action film. Once Na Hong-jin hits the accelerator, there is no turning back. We embark on a full-speed race against the clock. The long takes, the chase sequences, the use of slow motion to introduce the protagonists in the middle of the action, and the seemingly indestructible monster are all genre conventions that the director bends to his will to create a forceful narrative.

Within this stylized and majestic visual construction, however, the screenplay does not work with the same precision throughout all of its acts. There are moments when the internal logic of the story gives way to certain inconsistencies. Fortunately, the powerful performances from the cast carry the film from beginning to end. Whether in the most tense moments or the more playful sequences, the performances are simply fabulous. Hope subtly introduces a subtext that poses a dilemma and invites us to reflect on who the real monster is, but this remains buried beneath everything else the film has to offer.

Hope finds its best form when it fully embraces the game it has set out to play, delighting us with a classic monster-and-action story. Na Hong-jin finds new ways to play with the conventions of the genre and gives us a technically impressive film. The movie grabs us from its very first sequence and never lets us catch our breath until the final credits roll.