Hope

OVERVIEW

Na Hong-jin returns with his first film in ten years, a creature epic set in Hope Harbor, an isolated village only a few kilometers from the DMZ. When wildfires cut the phone lines and sever the town from the outside world, police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and a young officer (Hoyeon) find themselves responsible for protecting its mostly elderly residents from a dangerous, monstrous threat.

BACKGROUND

Na Hong-jin occupies an unusual place among the Korean filmmakers who brought the country’s genre cinema to international audiences. While Bong Joon-ho had Parasite, Park Chan-wook the Vengeance trilogy, and Yeon Sang-ho Train to Busan, Na never had the same kind of crossover hit. His closest equivalent is The Wailing, enormously respected among cinephiles and genre fans, but considerably less successful at pushing its director into the mainstream. Still, his name wass enough for Hope to be selected for the Cannes Official Competition in 2026, an unusual distinction for a 160-minute creature epic and reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made. Neon had already acquired North American rights before the festival, making its largest commitment to a non-English-language film since Parasite.

THE REVIEW

If Neon plays its cards right and prioritizes box office over awards campaigning, Hope may finally break Na Hong-jin through to an international popular audience, as the film delivers a kind of uncontrolled spectacle rarely seen in Western cinema. This is not a film with grand thematic ambition hiding behind its creature-film façade, operating instead at roughly the same thematic level as a classic Godzilla movie. A small Korean village unites against white Westerners who tear apart what its residents built with appalling ease, while a propaganda sign reading “Protect the Nation from Infiltration” hangs over the village and Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell arrive heavily CG-disguised as the unreadable Other. Like those classic monster movies, however, Hope is far more interested in immersing and overwhelming its audience, and at that it succeeds spectacularly.

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, as the creature leaves increasingly large footprints and 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) is propulsive, full-throated orchestral ferocity that Hollywood has largely abandoned. Na grants the room a handful of crowd-pleasing moments, including Sung-ae’s entrance with a machine gun, mounted to make the theater erupt. By the time a first 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 than 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 the length of a runway, 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 because of its duration but because of 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?

At a glance

4/5

“GLORIOUS”

#2 of 34 in Cannes 2026 Movies RankedSee the ranking →

• #7 of 197 in 2026 Movies Ranked →

Where to watch

🍿In Theaters

Where to watch

📅Coming soonOct 30, 2026

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