Premiering at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, Na Hong-jin’s Hope was one of the festival’s most anticipated films.
The story is set in Hope Harbour, a fictional town in South Korea, which appears to be located near the North Korean border, as suggested by slogans written on the houses.
The protagonist, Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min), is the local police chief. Not long after local hunters show him traces of an unknown monster, he discovers that the entire town is already being torn apart by the mysterious creature. Alongside him are rookie police officer Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) and Beom-seok’s nephew Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), one of the hunters who joins the fight to defend the town from what is eventually revealed to be an alien invasion.
Na Hong-jin’s previous works (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea) were both gripping thrillers. Hope begins with impressive momentum, as Na skillfully plays with the classic “unseen evil” trope, recalling early Spielberg films. The creature remains invisible for the entirety of its first hour, with the film instead focusing on the horrifying destruction it leaves behind.
Violent and striking shots fill the screen: houses are ripped apart, cars and furniture are thrown into the air like explosions, mutilated bodies, blood, and flesh cover the ground, sometimes even splattered against walls. It creates a chaotic sense of apocalypse. As the film builds increasingly absurd and spectacular scenes, curiosity steadily mounts about the beast; does it have any purpose at all?
But this is also where the film disappoints. When the creature is finally revealed, it appears in a rather generic, Avatar-like Alien form, rendered with very poor CGI. Once the truth emerges, rather than pivoting into deeper thematic territory, Hope just spends nearly another two hours on repetitive battle scenes.
The setting shifts from the town to the forest, yet the action itself remains largely unchanged, offering little in the way of narrative or dramatic progression. (An announcement of a sequel suggested there is more of the story still to come.)
With most of the narrative devoted to action, the unexpectedly hilarious dialogue scenes become the film’s highlights. Faced with this surreal disaster, all the actors go full Frat Pack mode in their performances. If you understand Korean, the crazy amount of swear words alone may have you die laughing. Their humour adds welcome variation and gives the audience room to breathe within an otherwise relentless thriller.
Especially considering its record-breaking budget and star-studded cast, however, it is disappointing that the film ultimately falls back on weak storytelling, which follows familiar blockbuster patterns, like the Marvel films. With South Korea already producing so many strong commercial films and TV series, it hardly needs another large-scale blockbuster to prove its strengths in the genre.
Overall, Hope is a sci-fi blockbuster that may meet mainstream expectations, but offers little of interest beyond its rather routine action sequences. After watching the film, I was left wondering why it was selected for the competition, rather than other sections, such as Midnight Screenings.
Yet after sitting through this year’s Competition lineup, which skewed heavily introspective, I found myself appreciating Hope for at least bringing a moment of pure entertainment to the festival.
The film enjoyed its world premiere In Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.