OVERVIEW
When wildfires pull reinforcements off the South Korean border, and the radios at Hope Harbor go silent, police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is left to deal with a strange and mysterious creature his outpost was never staffed for. Officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon) stays with him to defend an elderly village. A separate party led by hunter Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) climbs into the mountains to track the same thing, only to find the thing tracking them.
BACKGROUND
Of the Korean directors who reshaped global genre cinema in the 2000s and 2010s, Na Hong-jin is the one whose international reputation has stayed strangely contained. While Bong Joon-ho has Parasite, Park Chan-wook the Vengeance trilogy and Yeon Sang-ho, Train to Busan, Na has at best The Wailing, admired and known only by cinephiles. His name, however, was enough to land Hope a spot in the Cannes Official Competition of 2026, an impressive feat given that it is a 160-minute creature feature with the largest budget ever attached to a Korean film. Neon, increasingly the most aggressive American buyer at Cannes, took North America before the festival, the largest non-English commitment they have made since Parasite.
THE REVIEW
If Neon plays its cards right and prioritizes box office over awards campaigning, Hope may be the film that finally breaks Na Hong-jin through to the international popular audience, giving viewers the uncontrolled spectacle Miike has been delivering for decades and anime has been making more accessible, but which has yet to fully cross over in its purer form.
Because alien-invasion action films do not typically compete for the Palme d’Or, as well as the Neon acquisition and the hype generated by its record budget and the Hollywood A-listers cast, it is easy to approach Hope expecting grand thematic ambition or intricate metaphor behind the creature-film façade. Such is not the case. If you squint, the film can be read as a small Korean village uniting against white Westerners who tear apart what the villagers built with appalling ease. A propaganda sign in the village square, caught early in the film, reads “Protect the Nation from Infiltration,” while Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell arrive heavily CG-disguised as the unreadable Other. All of this applies. The more honest reading, however, is that Na is far less interested in the metaphor than in the choreography. Hope is built to immerse, to overwhelm, to make a room of festival critics flinch in their seats.
The film opens with its strongest section, a 40-minute masterclass in suspense, which begins with the police chief investigating a cow killed in the street under mysterious circumstances, first attributed to a bear or a tiger, until it becomes clear the wounds are impossibly far from either. He is gradually joined by an elderly villager played by Im Hyun-sik, while the creature leaves footprints and progressively larger disturbances, eventually revealing that the entire town has been devastated. Numerous moments suggest the reveal is imminent, only for the camera to pivot at the last second. The accumulation of these fake-outs would ordinarily collapse into frustration; Na’s discipline and command of the form keep the mystery widening to excruciating effect.
When the action finally arrives, the physical consequences are rendered with a weight the contemporary blockbuster has largely abandoned, the wholesale demolition of cities having become a visual default that the audience no longer registers as loss. Here, every collapse carries impact: motorcycles tossed like Hot Wheels, vehicles thrown across intersections, concrete buildings folding like cardboard. The relentless score by Michael Abels (Get Out, Us) drives the carnage forward, full-throated orchestral material of a kind Hollywood has largely abandoned, proving again that nothing builds spectacle quite like a well-composed orchestral score. Na grants the room a handful of crowdpleasing beats, including Sung-ae’s entrance with a machine gun, scored to make the theater erupt. By the time the creature is finally put down, the audience has sweated, gripped the armrests, and clenched far too many times to count. The film could have ended on that single setpiece and called it a day.
It obviously doesn’t, and with more than half the runtime still ahead, the film loses some steam. What follows is a generous breathing interlude, more for the audience than the characters, punctuated by hit-or-miss humor.Characters here are types you recognize on sight: the elder, the police chief, the rookie cop, the hunter. They register as visual silhouettes more then as people. They also work best when they are not talking; a long conversation about indigestion in particular is excessive and cringeworthy. After some meandering, it is revealed that the first creature was not alone, and the high-octane material resumes.
Na maintains the dynamism with impressive variety, shifting from car chases to horseback pursuits to extended shootouts. Scenes have cadence, with the rhythm of the camera, the breath between hits, the held beat before impact. At its best, it offers the pleasure of the best anime. Hong Kyung-pyo’s daylight cinematography gives every beat sharp, color-saturated clarity, and individual techniques, including a U-turn shot that requires the camera to travel a runway’s length, are genuinely delightful. Comparing the mastery in display to an MCU film becomes a pointless exercise.
Yet after a while, the action grows repetitive and tiring, not entirely due to its duration but to how little it varies. The same as a long indulgent installment in the John Wick franchise that reaches the point where we have already been convinced by its technical qualities yet continues to show them proudly. The staging remains striking, and even inside the monotony, you catch yourself impressed by a particular camera movement or a piece of choreography. More variance in the action grammar would have helped, as would a meaningful trim of the runtime. It can be argued that the boredom contributes to the characters in the same way the durational structure of Jeanne Dielman does, so that when the conclusion arrives, it feels more than earned, and they feel like they’ve gone through a lot. Still, the five-minute desert chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark reached the same effect through a much shorter runtime, proving you don’t always need length to achieve exhaustion.
There is a lot of CGI, and some will knock your socks off (the destruction mostly, of both the city and a spaceship later on), yet a few design choices remain puzzling. The monsters themselves are a little on the generic side, a mixture of everything seen in TV and movies for the past 20 years, from Pacific Rim to Edge of Tomorrow to Stranger Things to Jurassic World dinosaur mutants, yet they do the job of convincing us they are a far stronger force, one that requires more than humans can muster to defeat. The more controversial choice is when the creatures are revealed in their normal form, with the two main ones portrayed by actors Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. The latter is almost unrecognizable and fine, but seeing Fassbender’s face gives the uncanny valley effect an uncanny ugliness, on par with Tom Hooper’s Cats. The director has stated at the festival press that the team will continue working on the visual effects until the film’s theatrical release, but it is hard to imagine it improving much unless the entire design is redone, as was done in the first Sonic movie.
Ending on a conclusion that gives few answers and clearly promises a sequel, Hope is exhausting in many ways. Your tolerance for maximalist cinema will define how you feel about it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Hope arrives with unrelenting force, delivering glorious entertainment that blends the best of Spielbergian suspense-building, Asian-cinema wildness, and Korean dark humor. The first is executed masterfully; the others start to outstay their welcome by the 90-minute mark. Whatever Hope loses in the second hour, it remains the kind of huge, undisciplined swing that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible. The fact that for some of us, that screen was the Grand Lumière, as part of an Official Cannes Competition slate usually reserved for far more contained drama, could not have made me happier. Maybe they could hold off on the Godzilla Minus One sequel until next year’s Competition?