Blockbuster ‘Hope’ shows South Korea’s growing movie muscle

Acclaimed director Na Hong-jin has unveiled South Korea’s biggest budget film ever: a blood-splattered sci-fi thriller featuring killer extraterrestrials played by real-life couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. “Hope” by Na, whose low-budget horror movie “The Wailing” became a huge hit in his home country, was able to give free rein to his dark imagination in this gory tale of alien invasion.

“It’s the most expensive film in the history of Korean cinema,” Na said in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival where the film premiered on Sunday night. “It’s a film that really required a very, very large budget because of the special effects, the design, the actors.”

Despite having a genre-defying concept that was hard to sell initially — it skips between thriller, sci-fi, horror and comedy — he received backing from Korea’s Plus M Entertainment and a budget of around 30 million euros ($35 million). The cost of “Hope” underlines the increasing resources available to South Korean directors whose hit films such as the quadruple Oscar-winning “Parasite”, as well as TV series like “Squid Game” have turned the home of KPop music into a global entertainment centre.

Reviews for “Hope” were broadly positive, with Screen magazine calling it “a thunderously entertaining genre mash-up” while The Hollywood Reporter said it had “instant cult classic written all over it”. But others such as IndieWire slammed the quality of the special effects — suggesting the budget was “not enough” for Na’s grand ambitions — while its run-time of 160 minutes was described as “over long” by Variety.

Although married acting couple Fassbender and Vikander, stars of films from “12 Years a Slave” to “Ex Machina”, are listed on the film’s cast, many fans might struggle to recognise them. Their acting has been transformed by special effects, with all the recognisable lead roles performed by bankable Korean stars including Hwang Jung-min, as well as Hoyeon from “Squid Game”.

The all-action film, full of bodily fluids and gunfire, revolves around a clash between the residents of a remote town close to the frontier between South and North Korea and terrifying visitors from another planet. With its themes of conflict and the incompetence of local officials, Na said he had “the wars that we know at the moment and the political situation that we had” at the time in his mind as he was writing the screenplay.

“Hope”, intended as the first film in a series, is one of 22 films competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or prize for best film in Cannes. It is the first by Na in 10 years since “The Wailing”, which also focused on a remote location struggling with a mystery arrival.

The Cannes jury this year is headed by a South Korean director for the first time, Park Chan-wook, the maker of arthouse classics such as “Oldboy” and “The Handmaiden”.

“Korea is playing a role as one of the central hubs of the film world, and I believe this is a movement befitting the time,” he said last week. “It makes me think of a lot of the (Korean) predecessors who were truly outstanding but never had the opportunity to be recognised internationally,” he added. Park insisted that he would not favour his compatriot, Na.

“Some even joked that I might go out of my way to be harsher on a Korean film, because it wouldn’t look good if I appeared to be favouring it,” he said. “I intend to judge everything as fairly and objectively as possible.” Meanwhile, US music and screen legend Barbra Streisand has been forced to cancel an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival because of a knee problem, the organisers said on Sunday. The two-time Oscar winner was due to appear at Cannes to collect a lifetime achievement award but said her doctors told her not to travel while recovering from a knee operation. The festival said in a statement that it would still go ahead with plans to celebrate the career of the 84-year-old on Saturday, and wished her a speedy recovery.

Agence France-Presse