(Photograph: South China Morning Post)
Outrageous.
From Na Hong-jin, director of the phenomenal horror film "The Wailing" 10 years ago, the filmmaker has spent that interveneing time honing and concocting a unique cocktail of lunacy we don't see anymore, and which is a self-indulgent, sumptuous riot of a good time.
Beginning as a 45 minute chase sequence following the aftermath of a monster attack, building and crafting dread in a bombed out, ruined town reeling from the still current attack by an unknown entity, the film is breathless and tense and exciting and ever-escalating. When we finally see the monster, and rookie grenade-launcher sporting local cop Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) arrives on scene, it becomes a glorious spectacle.
Then the movie has the audacity to keep going.
It takes a break from proceedings to have a genuinely tense monster autopsy interspersed with pitch black humour (I love the vet and would die for her), expands its scope to be something of an ensemble piece as locals reel from this madness and figure out what is going on, then puts pedal to the metal for an outstanding final act of impeccably white-knuckle chase sequences, bombastic lunacy and a woodland horseback gunfight with AK-47s, whilst still remembering to be funny and unpredictable and exciting. It never dragged for me even in its more self-indulgent moments of exposition (a story about a hunter is gleefully gross), and when the seemingly suicical and overconfident hunter Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) takes centre stage, the film flips genres again to become a buddy cop madcap Looney Tunes adventure.
I miss when movies weren't afraid to be fun, to juggle genres and be about different things (I appreciate the recurring joke of asking where all of the guns came from and simply being given the answer: "I don't think that matters right now!").
Not since "The Host" have we had a daylight monster movie so good, and arguably not since that movie have we had a monster movie so enjoyable period.
The characters and performers are excellent (every monster is gangsta until Im Sung-ae shows up with a grenade launcher), the humour worked for me, and the monster design is uniformly creative and excellent, morphing between different forms and ideas with the same fluidity of the script. Its chases are truly outstanding pieces of cinema, and the bombed out town looks and feels excellent and pulsating, even in the midst of anarchy and chaos, idyllic peace shattered by this arrival. That the film still has the audacity to pepper in some neat social commentary (being close to the border of North Korea, some dissatisfaction with local civil servants, and more) is mere icing on the cake.
A wild time and well worth the wait.
Imagine you're at Cannes, expecting a drama in the vein of "Sentimental Value" and this menacing beast roars from the shadows, rears its head and pummels your expectations.
Hell yeah.
