At Cannes, one moviegoer’s trash becomes another’s treasure

In the heated and responsive environment of a film festival, one moviegoer’s trash becomes another’s treasure. But this week at Cannes, there were two world premieres that divided audiences with such intensity that it was hard to believe your eyes. In my mind, I had just witnessed two tire fires of epic proportions. But were they actually hidden masterpieces?

The first jolt of cognitive dissonance came Sunday night at the gala screening of South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s latest film, “Hope.” I don’t mean to abuse the obvious wordplay, but expectations for Hope were incredibly high.

Not only was the film Na’s first film in 10 years (his last film was the excellent 2016 thriller Lamentations), but it also boasted all the appealing elements of a blockbuster. It has an epic running time (160 minutes), an oddly assembled international cast (Squid Game co-star Jung Ho-young, Michael Fassbender and his real-life wife Alicia Vikander, Canadian actress Taylor Russell), and deliberately vague direction. Logline (“Ignorance begins by planting the seeds of disaster, and escalates through human conflict into a cosmic tragedy.”)

And for the first 45 minutes of Hope , the film delivered on great promise. A breathless car chase that turns into a gunfight in which the police chief of a small Korean village comes face to face with a mysterious creature (a tiger, or something worse?), Hope offers some of the best action scenes in recent memory. The film is loud, brutal, and grand in scale, shot with a swooping, wide-angle energy that pushes Na’s name into the major leagues occupied by Michael Bay, Gareth Evans, and pre-2010s John Woo. However, after the chaos subsides, Hope completely collapses.

Thanks to a combination of extremely clunky visual effects, a story that abandons any pretense of character, highly repetitive dialogue, and three unlikely casting decisions involving Fassbender, Vikander, and Russell, Na’s epic veers from full-throttle fun to soggy mess. By the time the film moves into what-not territory in its final ten minutes, the black-tie crowd in the festival’s main venue was nervously looking toward the exit. The cast, including a grinning Fassbender (wearing sunglasses at night and indoors), received a polite standing ovation. But I was left slack-jawed and confused.

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But in a heated conversation the next morning, many critics slammed Hope’s overall overreach. Even with poor CGI? An endless sequence in which an old villager monologues about wiping his butt? A final twist in the mythology that not only rips off Star Wars and Dune, but also the deferred finale of Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive (not a spoiler since only 50 people in North America saw the film)?

Apparently, all of the above is true, and Hope currently boasts a respectable 3.3-star rating curve on the movie review app Letterboxd, making it the number one place to get instant festival responses.

A few hard-hearted, genuinely delusional people even expect Hope to win the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. But I wouldn’t bet a single euro that the movie comes close to that.

But I’m willing to bet all my meager savings that Her Private Hell will be completely ignored by the Cannes jury.

It’s a deception, since the latest from Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Valhalla Rising, The Neon Demon) is playing outside of competition, as is often the case with films that may not fit neatly into the confines of Cannes prestige. But I also have a hard time believing anyone would give this movie any award other than a slap in the face.

A torturously dull fetish fairy tale, or something like that, focusing on a group of super-attractive young women barricaded in a high-rise hotel while a serial killer roams underground. The concept of narrative is quickly abandoned. Refn’s films are more a definition of style than content. Except the style in this case is an aggressively shallow bucket of overlit, undercooked fantasy that makes you reconsider the value of human creativity over AI slop. The two hours I sat at the gala on Monday night were the longest hours of my life, and I was shocked that this movie didn’t just get booed off the screen.

Instead, he found himself faced with an army of Refn defenders as soon as he posted his criticisms on social media. All of them were trying to devour this movie that sounded so awful and was actually sure to be a good movie. Everyone is different, but the momentary contrarian instinct made me and other critics—including those who staggered out of the film’s press screening the next morning—feel like its apologists were screaming into a mirror.

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I understand the sentiment behind the film’s intangible defense, with tweets ranging from “110% chance I’ll love this movie” to “a masterpiece to come”. Like Na’s Hope, Her Private Hell is Refn’s first film in 10 years. Also like Na, Refn maintained a strong fan base during his hiatus thanks to the goodwill he received from his previous critically acclaimed, ultra-sleek, neon-drenched features.

Indeed, until Monday night, I counted myself among his admirers. It wasn’t easy to defend Refn’s 2013 Ryan Gosling thriller “Only God Forgives,” or to count myself among the probably 30 people who actually watched his Netflix series “Copenhagen Cowboy.”

But those projects were fascinating experiments that were not meant to insult viewers or participants. Her private hell is pointless and empty, wasting the talent of everyone involved, including stars Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, and the totally unrecognizable Dougray Scott. But that title at least proves that Refn is still into the joke, even if he’s the only one laughing. It’s her private hell, but our public misery.