Na Hong-jin’s ‘Hope’ turns a tiny village tragedy into cosmic horror

Na Hong-jin doesn’t quite know what genre to call his most recent movie, “Hope.”

There are aliens in it, sure. There is a spaceship, chase scenes, violence and something close to science fiction. But to Na, the director behind “The Chaser” (2008), “The Yellow Sea” (2010) and “The Wailing” (2016), none of those labels fully explain his new film.

“The film doesn’t really fall into any of the categories,” Na said during a roundtable interview with reporters in Seoul on Tuesday, ahead of the film's domestic release next Wednesday. “Calling it just action wouldn't do. But calling it SF…I wasn’t sure if it was really SF.”

“Hope,” set in a small village near the Korean demilitarized zone, begins with a dead cow in the middle of the street. A group of hunters, and police chief Bum-seok, played by Hwang Jung-min, go on separate searches to find the reason behind the killing, first believed to have been caused by a tiger. As they soon find out, they are up against something far larger and seemingly impossible to defeat, turning the encounter into a brutal fight for survival.

The story, as it eventually unravels, goes further back. It starts from what Na described as a seemingly “minor incident” by a character who is not acting out of malice. But that small action becomes the source of a tragedy that grows far beyond the village.

“The film asks how far something like that can grow,” Na said.

Na said he wanted the story to begin in a place that felt cut off from the world, only to expand into something cosmic.

“It had to be somewhere that could be isolated,” he said. “It also had to have value in terms of how it could be used later. Something that starts in a very small, shabby place — something not even the size of a dot — becomes a story of the whole universe.”

That was part of why the film is set near the border with North Korea, and why it takes place in a time before smartphones, according to Na.

“To be honest, if there were cell phones, there would be too many things I would have to explain,” the director said, jokingly adding that he found the idea “too much of a hassle.”

For Na, the aliens were not simply there to turn the film into a creature feature or an alien invasion movie.

“I wondered what could be a deeper perspective than the supernatural phenomena I had worked with before,” he said, such as in “The Wailing,” where he worked with Hwang as a mudang (Korean shaman) who communicated with spirits. “I wanted to approach something bigger than that.”

That led him, eventually, to space.

Yet Na did not want the extraterrestrial beings to look too obviously like aliens.

“You’re not supposed to know it’s an alien,” he said. “In the film, when it appears, you shouldn’t know right away that it is an alien.”

The point was not simply to surprise viewers, but to unsettle them. If the creature looked too familiar, the audience would know too quickly how to read it. Na wanted something more uncertain, a being that would make viewers question what they were seeing before they could decide what side they were on.

“It doesn’t really matter what comes out, unless it’s Twinky Winky,” he joked, referring to the purple Teletubby. “Anything could have come out. But at the point where it feels like an alien should appear, I wanted people to think, ‘That’s not an alien.’ I wanted that sense of strangeness.”

Creating those aliens, however, was one of the hardest parts for production, and also one of the most scrutinized. “Hope,” after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May as the only Korean film to compete for the top prize, was widely praised for its action sequences but heavily criticized for the computer graphics used for the creatures, with some critics saying the aliens were “janky” or just plain “bad.”

Some scenes were difficult because they were not simply technical problems, Na said, but matters of performance and emotion. In one crying scene, the team used motion capture and high-speed filming, but the material did not match the way he wanted once digital work began.

“If we had shot it with an actor, it would have been an NG [no good shot],” he said. “It had to be OK, but the OK didn’t come.”

Other difficulties came from the decision to show the creature during the day. The film was shot in places including Haenam, South Jeolla — the Korean Peninsula's southernmost city — where sunlight and clouds change constantly, making the footage inconsistent from shot to shot. Adding a digital creature into that environment only made the problem worse.

“It was my fault for making an alien run around in broad daylight,” Na said.

Even after showing the film, Na said he was still working on it. He rewatched it at Monday's press screening, then rushed back to continue sound mixing, including adjustments for the Dolby Atmos version. The sound, he said, was important enough that parts of the work had to be redone entirely.

“I want to do my best until the very end,” he said.

BY KIM JU-YEON [[email protected]]