Review of the Week: Hope

(15, 160 mins, in cinemas now)

When director Na Hong-Jin’s third feature, supernatural thriller The Wailing, came out in 2016, it was a word-of-mouth hit – a cool title to drop in conversation, when signifying one’s in-the-know, cineaste credentials. Then, in the subsequent decade, Korean cinema went truly mainstream, with Bong Joon-ho’s elegant social satire Parasite becoming the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Academy Award, and Hwang Dong-hyuk’s dystopian survival thriller Squid Game becoming Netflix’s all-time most-viewed series around the world.

With all this as precedent, Na Hong-Jin’s action-thriller fourth film, Hope, a hit at Cannes earlier this year, is set to be a monster movie in several senses: It’s got a circa $70m budget (reportedly Korea’s most costly ever), a gargantuan 2 hour 36 minute running time and a creature-feature set-up that, at least initially, recalls both Hollywood hits like Jaws (1975) and home-grown classics like Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006).

As the opening credits roll, a sweeping aerial landscape shot situates us in Hope Harbour, a remote town near the Korean demilitarised zone, cut off from its surroundings by coastline and dense woodland. Police chief Ko Bum-seok (The Wailing’s Hwang Jung-min) is driving out to meet some hunters who’ve called in a grisly find: a dead cow, mutilated and dumped in the middle of the road. But what on earth could have caused such damage to such a large animal? And is it coincidental that these hunters are all dressed like Texan lumberjacks who just spotted a UFO?

That’s about all we get in the way of characterisation, before being plunged into the lengthy action sequence which makes up the full first third of the film, as Chief Bum-seok and some have-a-go-hero townsfolk take on their unidentified foe. Whatever it is, it’s large enough to lay waste to Hope Harbour’s homes and businesses, but small enough to stay conspicuously out of frame. 

Conspicuously and also wisely. Received creature-feature wisdom has it that the less you actually show on screen, the better. Audiences are then forced to fill in the dark shadows with their own imaginings, which are almost always more terrifying than anything even the most cutting-edge CGI and prosthetics departments could conjure.

As it happens, Hong Kyung-pyo’s distinctive, daylight cinematography doesn’t have many dark shadows to hide in. Instead we’re in the forest, treated to rich browns and lush greens, as the hunters pick their way among the moss-covered tree-trunks, in search of the alien-monster’s lair. Or we’re stalking through a produce-packed, blood-splattered high street, as an air-raid siren sounds.

Unfortunately, all the polished production design means that when, eventually, the creature does reveal itself, its scraggly CGI form is all the more unimpressive and unconvincing by contrast. That doesn’t matter so much in the blur of a high-octane chase sequence, and Hope has several. The best involves three species, two transport modes and one utterly ingenuous moment of bathos. 

We’re also somewhat distracted from our disappointment by model turned mononymous Squid Game star Hoyeon, who makes her big entrance – and indeed her big-screen debut – around the same time as the monster does. She does all her own stunts as Sung Ae, an energetic rookie cop who arrives to save the day in action-babe slo-mo, then commences firing off both bullets and potty-mouthed zingers (“You stinking butthole, you’re gonna pay for this!”). 

Those yet to develop a taste for Korean cinema’s very specific, sometimes wacky humour may find such punchlines don’t quite translate. But then there’s also the old ginseng farmer, Mr Hae-sul, who interrupts the action with a scatological shaggy-dog story so hilarious it proves that poo jokes, at least, know no borders.

We don’t have nearly enough time with him, or the town’s other eccentric human inhabitants, and instead see rather too much of their alien visitors. The film’s second half often feels like a grab-bag of design ideas and sci-fi references, with a hastily sketched out schema for an entire extraterrestrial civilisation tagged on. Stars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander are so unrecognisable in their brief, motion-capture-suited cameos, you wonder why they bothered turning up, and it all culminates in a final scene that’s less like the logical ending of this movie and more like the beginning of an entirely different one (in fact, Na Hong-Jin has already confirmed a sequel is in the works). 

Yet despite the extraneous material and unstructured mayhem, Hope still justifies an audience’s high hopes. Because when it’s good, it’s very good. And it’s never less than lively.

Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year 2025