In Cannes, one moviegoer’s trash is another’s treasure

Open this photo in gallery:

In the heated, quick-reaction environment of a film festival, one moviegoer’s trash is another’s treasure. But at Cannes this week, there were two world premieres that divided audiences with such full-throated intensity that it was hard to trust my own eyes. To my mind, I had just witnessed a pair of epic-level tire fires. But were they, in fact, secret masterpieces?

The first slap of cognitive dissonance arrived Sunday night with the gala screening of Hope, the latest from South Korean director Na Hong-jin. Not to abuse any obvious wordplay, but the hopes for Hope were incredibly high.

Not only was the film the first from Na in a decade – his last movie was the superb 2016 thriller The Wailing – but it also boasted all the tantalizing ingredients of a big juicy hit: an epic-length runtime (160 minutes), a curiously assembled international cast (Squid Game co-star Jung Ho-yeon, Michael Fassbender and his real-life wife Alicia Vikander, Canadian actress Taylor Russell), and a deliberately vague logline (“What begins as ignorance plants the seed of disaster, escalating through human conflict into a tragedy of cosmic proportions.”)

And for Hope’s first 45 minutes, the film delivered on its big promises. Featuring a breathless car chase-turned-shoot-out in which the police chief of a small Korean village faces off against a mysterious creature (is it a tiger, or something worse?), Hope offers some of the best action sequences in recent memory. It is loud, brutal and massive in scale, all shot with the kind of swooping, wide-lensed energy that punts Na’s name into the big league occupied by Michael Bay, Gareth Evans and a pre-2010s John Woo. But after the chaos subsides, Hope falls apart spectacularly.

Owing to a combination of exceptionally janky visual effects, a story that abandons any pretense of character, extremely repetitive dialogue and three improbable casting decisions regarding Fassbender, Vikander and Russell, Na’s epic goes from full-throttle fun to a soggy mess. By the time the film’s final 10 minutes shifted the movie into what-in-god’s-name-is-this territory, the black-tie crowd inside the festival’s main venue was nervously darting their eyes toward the exit. Na and his cast, including a huge-grinned Fassbender (sporting sunglasses at night, and inside), received a polite standing ovation. But I was left slack-jawed and brain-zapped.

‘Cinema with courage’: At Cannes, Ukrainian filmmakers fight the good fight

Yet in heated conversations the next morning, a number of critics came out swinging for Hope’s all-out excess. Even the shambolic CGI? The interminable sequence in which an elderly villager delivers a monologue about wiping his butt? The last-minute twist involving mythology that rips off not only Star Wars and Dune, but also the unhinged finale of Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive (this isn’t a spoiler, because only 50 people in North America have seen that movie)?

Apparently, yes to all of the above, with Hope currently sporting a respectable “3.3 stars” rating curve on the movie-review app Letterboxd, the first place to go for instant festival reaction.

A few hearty, sincerely delusional souls even expect that Hope will capture the festival’s ultimate prize, the Palme d’Or. But I wouldn’t bet a single Euro on the movie getting anywhere close.

I would, however, put all my meagre savings into a wager betting that Her Private Hell will be completely ignored by the Cannes jury.

Okay, this is a cheat, since the latest film from Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Valhalla Rising, The Neon Demon) is playing out of competition, as frequently happens with movies that might not fit neatly into Cannes’ prestige borders. But I also have a hard time believing that anyone will award the film something other than a slap to the face.

A torturously dull and fetishistic fairy tale focusing on a group of ultraglam young women holed up in a sky-high hotel as a serial killer stalks the ground below – or something like that; any notion of narrative is abandoned quickly – Refn’s movie is the definition of style over substance. Except the style in this case is an aggressively shallow bucket of over-lit and undercooked fantasia that makes you reconsider the value of human creativity over AI slop. Sitting down for the gala Monday night was the longest two hours of my life, and I was shocked that the film wasn’t simply booed off the screen.

Instead, as soon as I posted my own criticism on social media, I found myself facing an army of Refn defenders, all of whom were eager to gobble up a movie that sounded so magnificently bad that it must, surely, in fact be good. To each their own, but the instant contrarian instinct threw me and other critics – including those who shambled out of the film’s press screening the next morning – as if defenders were screaming at a mirror.

Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson crime drama Paper Tiger roars Cannes wide awake

I understand the sentiment behind the sight-unseen defences of a film, with tweets floating out there ranging from “110 per cent chance I will love this movie,” and “masterpiece incoming.” Like Na’s Hope, Her Private Hell is Refn’s first film in a decade. And also like Na, Refn has maintained a robust fanbase during that period of inactivity, owing to the goodwill he earned for his previous run of critically acclaimed, ultraslick neon-drenched features.

Heck, up until Monday night, I counted myself among his admirers. It hasn’t been easy defending Refn’s 2013 Ryan Gosling thriller Only God Forgives, or counting myself among the maybe three dozen people who have actually seen his Netflix series Copenhagen Cowboy.

But those projects were fascinating experiments that didn’t insult their audiences and participants. Her Private Hell, which wastes the talents of all involved, including stars Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu and a completely unrecognizable Dougray Scott, is a meaningless and empty thing. Its title, though, at least proves that Refn is still in on his joke, even if he’s the only one laughing. It’s Her Private Hell, but our public misery.