In hindsight, Na Hong-jin’s Hope feels like one of those premises that, when you finally see it, you’re shocked it hasn’t been done before; what if Cloverfield, but set on the paranoid and heavily armed rural Korean border? The result is a tense, goofy, relentless, and just plain fun monsters vs unprepared townsfolk romp (that somehow managed to compete against a lot of the year’s most serious arthouse movies at May’s Cannes Film Festival) that certainly has its failings, but is mostly an utter blast. It’s been ten long years since Na’s last film, the genuinely upsetting horror The Wailing, but a decade away has seemingly just made him all the more ambitious and confident.
Running at a full 160 minutes, Hope spends admirably little time at anything other than a full sprint – not quite Fury Road territory but closer than most films dare to get. Local police chief Beom-seok (Hwang Jun-min) is called over to a case of a slaughtered bull blocking the road, killed by something with terrifyingly large claws. Within about 15 minutes, the ‘culprit’ escalates from probably a bear to maybe a tiger to definitely a raging alien monster and then it’s all go from there.
The cops and the people of the local town Hope Harbour spend their time either chasing the creature or being chased by it, vengeful bands of heavily armed hunters zooming one way on a truck before fleeing the other once they see how outmatched they are. It’s gruesome, scary, and funny all at once, and Na really holds back on letting us see the monster until we’ve seen and heard all the chaos it can cause, ratcheting up the tension for a very long time, with lots of weird low angles and invasive close-ups keeping us off-kilter while the characters try and piece together what’s happening.
This is very effective on its own merits but also has a less impressive ulterior motive – when you finally see the creature, it’s all a bit wonky. The actual design is solid, all gross and uncanny (it has a rapid skittering movement that is genuinely a bit nauseating when matched to its slimy lumbering frame), but the CG work here is pretty poor. When the light hits right and everything’s in rapid motion, it’s fine enough, but there are points where Hope straight up looks like a Resident Evil YouTube fan film, and that is undeniably distracting.
Thankfully, the set-pieces still all work thanks to the cast’s frantic performances and top-flight sound design. Hwang is a compelling lead as Beom-seok gets braver and braver hunting the monster, but the show is stolen by Hoyeon as deputy Sung-ae, whose very first scene involves her whooping alien ass with a grenade launcher, and Zo In-sung as Sung-ki, the unofficial leader of the local militia who literally just gets cooler and cooler with every scene. Given the self-serving panic and madness of a lot of the civilians, these two shine all the brighter as some of 2026’s best action heroes.
If you’ve paid attention to the marketing, you’ll know that Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander also pop up in Hope, but to spoil how would be criminal – when you first really spy them, it’s one of the film’s best ‘oh shit’ moments. Unfortunately, this moment is also when Hope loses its footing a bit, launching into a finale that is half fist-pumping thrill but also half weird slowdown into a lore-heavy non-ending that is more sequel bait than actual conclusion. A film like Hope was always going to be hard to land, but this final swerve was met with bemusement by the until-then very engaged crowd I saw it with.
It’s an ending that, along with the often-crummy effects work, does mar Hope somewhat, but is not enough to pull it back from being a hearty recommend. A proper, rip-roaring monster movie that always puts entertainment first and foremost, it kept me gripped for the vast majority of its giant runtime and, while I didn’t like that it spent most of its last 15 minutes setting up a franchise, I sure as hell will be tuning in to the next instalment, whenever it comes.
