'Who is that?' — Eom Moon-seok's scene-stealing turn in 'Hope'

A still from the film "Hope" [Plus M Entertainment]

"The monster — it's in our house, I tell you."

One face from Na Hong-jin's "Hope" is not easily forgotten. Amid the unmistakable presences of Hwang Jung-min, Jo In-sung and Jung Ho-yeon, a figure of indeterminate identity quietly takes over the screen. That figure is Yangbae.

The ending credits reveal a shocking answer

Yangbae is both the spark that ignites the disaster upending the once-peaceful town of Hopohang and a character the film's narrative cannot do without. His appearance is somehow off — hard to pinpoint exactly what is wrong — and his manner oscillates between bumbling and deeply unsettling. The dank house where he lives, and whatever he has hidden inside it, lock together to form one of the film's central questions.

Acting out of ignorance and indifference, Yangbae sets in motion something irreversible. The ripples spread far beyond one person's tragedy, swallowing an entire community in catastrophe. Can a wrongdoing without malice still be evil? Yangbae sits at the sharpest point of "Hope's" signature blurring of the line between good and evil.

Yangbae as he appears in "Hope" [Plus M Entertainment]

The trouble is that Yangbae's identity is nearly impossible to guess while watching the film. Beomseok is unmistakably Hwang Jung-min from a hundred meters away; Seonggi is recognizably Jo In-sung even glimpsed through a train window; Seonghae is obviously Jung Ho-yeon to anyone. Yangbae alone is different. Just as viewers wonder which unknown rookie actor could deliver a performance like this, the ending credits supply a name: Eom Moon-seok.

Nothing about him — his looks, his speech, any detail at all — connects to the Eom Moon-seok audiences know. He has erased himself entirely and dissolved into the character.

At post-screening audience events, Eom has played the gap to comic effect. Videos circulating online show him grabbing the microphone and immediately slipping into Yangbae's dialect, worried the crowd will not recognize him, then drawing laughter with a deadpan introduction: "You might be wondering why I'm up here — I played Yangbae."

For many audiences, the face they associate with Eom Moon-seok first is the street thug Jang Ryong from the drama series "Hot Blooded Priest," where he first shared the screen with Hwang Jung-min. That connection became the bridge to "Hope." In a YouTube appearance alongside Eom, Hwang said he had readily agreed when director Na Hong-jin floated Eom as a casting candidate, describing him as "an actor who has so much more than what I already knew."

'A man with too many drawers to open'

Eom Moon-seok is, in practice, a man of many talents. He played hockey as a child before trading in his stick for a career in dance. In 2005 he released his debut studio album "SIC," and he went on to form Monsters, a performance crew rooted in krump. He came to wider public attention in 2013 when he appeared on Mnet's "Dancing 9," a television dance competition.

If dance claimed 20 years of his life, the dream of becoming an actor ran quietly alongside it the whole time. Even while performing, he consistently took roles in short films to sharpen his craft. He began building name recognition with the 2017 drama series "Whisper" and the film "Confidential Assignment," then earned recognition for both his popular appeal and his acting with "Hot Blooded Priest" and "The Roundup." More recently he appeared as a villain in "Deluxe Taxi 3," delivering another intense performance.

Eom Moon-seok during his appearance on Mnet's "Dancing 9" [Mnet Dancing 9]

His exceptional physical foundation — honed through action and dance — combined with a performing range that spans comic supporting roles, brutal villains and unsettling enigmatic figures regardless of genre or tone, stands as his greatest asset. He has even walked the Cannes red carpet: his directorial debut, the short film "A and Eo," was invited to the non-competition section of the Cannes International Film Festival in 2017. Hwang Jung-min's description — "a man with too many drawers to open" — hits the mark.

His diligence shows in how he joined "Hope" as well. According to director Na, Eom went through a formal audition to win the role, proactively preparing and sending a self-recorded performance video to the production team.

That effort came through on screen. At a "Hope" audience Q&A, director Bong Joon-ho praised Eom's facial expressiveness and the tempo and rhythm with which he moves his face. Na Hong-jin drew laughs from the crowd by adding, with a straight face, "He also washes his hair every day."

A still from "Hope" [Plus M Entertainment]

According to Na Hong-jin, the theatrical release of "Hope" is a revised version of the cut submitted to the Cannes International Film Festival. During editing, he restored scenes involving Yangbae that had been cut from the Cannes version — expanding some while trimming others to arrive at a similar running time. The result is a Yangbae who is considerably fuller than the one Cannes audiences first encountered. Having seen the film, it is easy to understand why the director made that choice.

In a recent press interview, Na said he "restored the deleted scenes of Yangbae, the character who appears in the middle," adding that he "expanded his scenes and cut a few others so the running time came out roughly the same" as the Cannes cut.

balme@heraldcorp.com