The most brilliant and disconcerting film spectacle of the year

Before the Lumière brothers' cinematograph filmed the workers of their factory leaving into the street after a day of work, there was the horse that Eadweard Muybridge immortalized in a series of photographs animated by the rotation of the zoopraxiscope. For some, this is the true first film in history, reclaimed by some of the most interesting works of contemporary cinema: from Holy Motors by Leos Carax to Nope! by Jordan Peele. The latest to give a nod to these seminal images is the Korean Na Hong-jin, who delights in the gallop of the animal being chased by an extraterrestrial creature during one of the explosive action sequences that occupy the bulk of the footage of Hope. In the same way that Muybridge's primitive artifact could not fully capture equestrian movement, Na shows the race of the alien creature as a vertigo impossible to grasp with the eyes (or with cameras), and synthesizes in one stroke a chronology of the traction of bodies (animal, human, and digital) that contains within itself the history of cinema.

But Hope is not a treatise on figurative theory, but a film fundamentally concerned with the pure gesture, which unfolds the confrontation between the hardened (and clumsy) inhabitants of a small town and some galactic invaders (?) with a notion of a rushed present that has no time to form a coherent narrative, just as the protagonists do not find the moment to stop and think why they are shooting at these beings, or what is the reason why their eyes are soaked with tears. In a way, this critic almost wishes that Na does not manage to give continuity to the universe of this film, since its current form –anticlimactic, absurd, and inconclusive– radiates a deeply acidic political stance that any attempt at explanation would only weaken.