2026 | rated R | starring | Hwang Jung-min, Hoyeon | written & directed by Na Hong-Jin | 2 hrs 40 mins | In Korean with Subtitles | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
Contains Spoilers
In the small seaside town of Hope Harbor, Seok (Hwang Jung-min, The Wailing), the local sheriff, returns from a call of cattle mutilation to find the town ravaged by a creature or creatures laying waste to everything in its path. He follows the path of destruction, while a pack of hunters follow their own path into the forest, to find a large, fast, monster that threatens to wipe them all out.
A full decade since Na Hong-Jin’s The Wailing released and became a slow-burn streaming hit for horror fans, Hong-Jin returns with his passion project: a gargantuanly expensive, nearly 3-hour alien invasion movie. It’s a work that reeks of Passion Project – Hong-Jin cashing in his credit built by Wailing to do whatever he wants – in all the great and head-slapping ways these movies tend to go. It’s long, indulgent, frustrating, beautifully shot, original and completely bonkers. In 2026, it’s rare to see an action/sci-fi movie of this scale be an original IP.
Much of Hope particularly the first hour, plays like a video game, where our line hero walks among the wreckage of a disaster with a shotgun and tries to put the pieces together, gaining disposable allies and increasing weaponry along the way. The first half or so of Hope is excellent. It feels lived-in, tactile, the money is on the screen. We are in it with Seok and the slow roll out of what’s happening is both a little frustrating (it leans hard into the don’t-show-the-monster trope) and the thing that keeps us glued to the screen as clues are coming from every direction in the environment. Then Seok’s fellow officer Sung (Hoyeon, Squid Game) shows up in a police car and a sub machine gun and the movie shifts into an even better, full-throttle chase film. The chase sequences in this movie are some of the best put on screen in years. The car whips through the trashed-out Hope Harbor streets, horses flee through the forest in last-second escapes. It’s like The French Connection or Bullitt. Last year, a bunch of Gen Z and hipster Oscar voters saw their first car chase in One Battle After Another and thought it was the most revolutionary thing ever. Their heads would explode watching this movie. Hope is a masterclass in how to stage and execute this kind of action. It’s thrilling and it sustains itself for the most part for the entire over 2 1/2 hour run time.
Because that roll-out is so much built into the movie’s enjoyment, I’d say anything revealed here would be a spoiler that hampers that – but we’re going to have to here, so proceed with caution going forward. What makes this movie work and not work is behind the spoiler wall here. Things start launching into weird territory as soon as the creatures reveal themselves. They are original creations, humanoid giants with human-faces like something out of Attack on Titan. They quickly morph into whatever Hong-Jin needs them to do, dropping to all fours and speed-running or opening what appeared to be their face into a massive set of jaws before reforming it back. Aliens that don’t look like greys or giant bugs and whose skill set and true nature we are constantly learning. It’s so refreshing.
It’s also weirdly scatological. Between the chases and arguments, Hong-Jin drops a strange sense of humor, at one point stopping the movie dead for a character to do a lengthy monologue about a time they had diarrhea while hiding from the monsters. Hong-Jin and the actor lean hard into the increasingly graphic details of the diarrhea as if trolling us all into laughter. It comes off more like a Paul Feig movie where Melissa McCarthy improvises to fill 10 minutes of dead screentime. Hey, that’s what you get when you write a director a blank check.
Hope suffers from an issue that plagues a lot of action/monster movies in the era of mixing CGI creatures with people. An issue that is present in almost every movie like this that we look past. It stands out like a sore thumb here because the rest of this movie is so good and so ground-level tactile. That issue is Speed Scaling. In most modern movies every time a CGI monster is chasing a human, the monster is incredibly fast, leaping around with inhuman strength and speed-running from one end of the frame to the next. The actor is running as fast as they can, not nearly as fast as this creature and we’re suspending our disbelief to pretend that the human is staying just ahead of this creature. Think about it, it’s in just about every movie. In Hope that speed scaling is too out-of-whack. I’m regularly expected to think that these people are outrunning this alien monster that is zipping through the forest. Now, in fairness the movie shows, several times, the aliens sliding into stuff and tripping over things, but it seems like the only reason our heroes are still alive is the alien’s general clumsiness or unfamiliarity with their surroundings.
That’s a nit-pick that’s worth pointing out. That’s not the real glaring issue with Hope. That issue is the ending. I’m ok with movies stopping suddenly, which this one does. I’m even ok with a cliffhanger ending, which this movie definitely has. But Hong-Jin has gone a step even further than that. Hope leaves so many questions unanswered, and so many plotlines open and ends at a point that opens the story up, that it simply feels like an incomplete story. The ending ripples backward to unhinge the rest of the movie’s structure. It is all racing toward something that we never see. Think about other cliffhanger movies, The Matrix Reloaded, for example. Yes, it has a cliffhanger, but it still builds to a third act climax that makes for a satisfying story inside the larger continuing story. Hope is not that. We’re in the third act climax and don’t know that we are until it’s over. In retrospect the entire movie is structured like the first act of a much bigger story.
Original, creative, a unique vision by its creator and an expertly crafted action movie. All rare things in the current movie-going landscape that prove studios outside of Hollywood are still putting effort into making movies. All things that make Hope kind of a must-see despite its unsatisfying ending. This has to be the first part of a trilogy or duology that as of release we don’t know will ever be made. It’s an incredibly ballsy move, and to the film’s highest compliment, I am fully onboard to see where this goes. However, as of now, we’re left with an incomplete work and an unsatisfying experience. Maybe this will be a hit, and we won’t have to wait another decade until the next installment.