Hope is the new film from Na Hong-jin, the director of The Chaser and The Wailing — and his first film since The Wailing a decade ago. It’s reportedly the most expensive South Korean film ever made, and in the US it became the widest release for a Korean film since Parasite, taking nearly $5 million in its first week.
In the remote village of Hope Harbor, police chief Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and officer Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) are called to investigate something wreaking havoc on the town — and are soon joined by a group of local hunters in a desperate fight against something nobody has encountered before.
Our verdict: Hope is a spectacular, frustrating, overflowing film — one magnificent monster movie with a second, much messier epic stapled to the back of it. See it anyway. There’s nothing else quite like it.
That Opening Stretch
It’s worth dwelling on how good the first act is, because it’s the reason people keep recommending a film they have real reservations about.
Gritty, grounded, and so convincing that one reviewer wondered whether they’d actually demolished a real town.
Hong Kyung-pyo’s cinematography — the colour grading, the slow-motion, the action framing — draws near-universal praise.
Far funnier than the trailer suggests, with running gags, family bickering and a scene-stealing elderly archer.
A long, relentless assault on the port town that keeps escalating long after you expect it to stop.
The humour is the surprise. Hope is, for long stretches, genuinely comic — full of distinctly Korean family ribbing, deadpan exchanges and a town of elderly residents who produce firearms from nowhere when trouble arrives. The contrast between that warmth and the escalating horror is exactly what makes the opening sing.
Then It Keeps Going
An Enormous Film for the Money
The Cast
Hwang Jung-min anchors the film as the police chief, and Jung Ho-yeon — best known internationally for Squid Game — is a standout as Sung-ae, getting some of the film’s most kinetic action moments, including stunt driving that one reviewer compared to a Fast & Furious film. Zo In-sung leads much of the forest storyline.
The cast also includes an unusually international line-up for a Korean production, with Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton all credited. We’ll leave it to you to discover how they fit in.
The real heart of the ensemble, though, is the town itself — the pensioners, the hunters and the overmatched local police. Reviewers loved them, and the film’s best comedy comes from their collective refusal to act like people in a monster movie.
What the Critics Said
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
| The Good | The Bad | The Ugly |
|---|---|---|
| A Near-Perfect Opening HourA monster barely glimpsed, a town full of armed pensioners, and a relentless first attack on the port. Reviewers consistently put this stretch in 9/10 territory. | Too Many ChasesFoot, horse, car, horse again, horse and car together. Each one is well made. Together, they blur — and several run well past the point where the idea has landed. | The Daylight CGIWhen the creature is hidden, it’s terrifying. When it’s shown clearly in bright daylight, the effects can’t carry it — and the film does this more and more as it goes on. |
| Gorgeous CinematographyHong Kyung-pyo’s camerawork, colour grading and slow-motion action are consistently singled out as the film’s most unimpeachable strength. | A Forest Subplot It Doesn’t NeedA parallel storyline that several reviewers felt could be heavily trimmed in favour of the three central characters in town. | An Ending That’s Really a BeginningIt opens up far more than it resolves and sets up a sequel hard. If that sequel doesn’t happen, a lot of viewers will feel short-changed. |
| Genuinely FunnyMuch more comedy than the trailer implies — running gags, family ribbing, and a small-town ensemble that steals the film. | The Humour FadesThe comic warmth that carries the first half largely disappears in the second, which is part of why it feels like two different films. | 2 Hours 36 MinutesFor a monster movie, that’s long. Nearly everyone who reviewed it felt it would have been better with a significant chunk cut. |
| Scale Far Beyond Its BudgetA reported $46 million that looks like several times that, thanks to practical sets and real destruction blended with effects work. | — | — |
The Verdict
Hope is what happens when a genuinely great filmmaker is given more money than anyone in his country has ever had and refuses to leave a single idea on the cutting-room floor. The result is one of the best monster movies of the year, followed by something much larger, much stranger, and much harder to love.
The opening is extraordinary. The sets feel real, the camerawork is stunning, the humour is warm and surprising, and the creature is terrifying precisely because you barely see it. If the film had held that discipline, we’d be talking about a modern classic.
It doesn’t. It shows you more, repeats its best tricks until they stop working, splits its attention across two storylines, and ends by opening a door rather than closing one. None of it is lazy — all of it is excess. Which is a much better problem to have, and a much more interesting film to argue about.
The honest read: see it on the biggest screen you can find — the destruction, the sound and the scale deserve it — and go in knowing it’s a long night with a brilliant first half. If you love ambitious, overstuffed genre cinema, you’ll forgive it. If you want a tight creature feature, you’ll leave wishing someone had been brave enough to cut an hour.
Either way, you’ll want to talk about it afterwards. That’s rarer than it should be.
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