Hope movie review: At 160 minutes, this film is double the length it should have been. At one and a half monsters, it had just the right number, before becoming greedy.

Writer-director Na Hong-jin, whose films combining horror and thrills have had both commercial and critical success, overplays his hand here. So much so that even charismatic actor couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander have to make do with crumbs, hidden under make-up and prosthetics.

Hope begins very promisingly, as Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min), police chief of the town on which the film is named, is called by his cousin Sung ki (Zo In-sung) to investigate the sudden appearance of a dead and badly mutilated bull in the middle of a lane, amidst fields.…