Hope

Reviewed by Fraser · 8 min read · Rated November 2026

Before anything else, let me set the temperature for this whole review, because I think you deserve to know where I landed before we go any further. Hope had really, really good potential. It has some amazing action sequences, proper high octane, edge of your seat stuff, but it also has some even bigger misses, and those misses took a serious bite out of the experience for me. So this is a mixed review, and you’re going to feel that all the way through, because that’s exactly how I felt watching it.

There’s some background worth knowing here, because it absolutely shaped how I walked into this one. Hope is the new film from Korean writer and director Na Hong-jin, and this is his first feature since The Wailing, all the way back in 2016. Ten years between films. And if you’ve seen The Wailing, you’ll understand why expectations for this were through the roof: that film is one of the great slow-burn mysteries of the last couple of decades, a small village story that keeps growing into something darker and stranger the longer it runs. Before that he made The Chaser and The Yellow Sea, two absolutely ferocious Korean thrillers, so the man has a track record most directors would kill for. Hope competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, it runs about 2.5 hours, and it reportedly carries the biggest budget of any Korean film ever made. So the stage was set. I remember seeing the trailer a few months ago and saying to myself, right, I definitely need to watch this one. One more thing worth flagging before we get into the story: yes, it’s subtitled. But here’s the thing. Because it’s a big action movie, there’s a lot of running, a lot of chasing, a lot of sequences where nobody’s saying a word. So if subtitles normally put you off, honestly, still give this one a go, because the subtitles are quite light. There’s so much happening on screen that there just isn’t a huge amount of talking.

The Setup

The film takes place in Hope Harbor, an isolated coastal village near the Demilitarized Zone, and the movie does a lovely job of making the place feel like it’s full of elderly people seeing out their retirement. It’s quiet, it’s remote, and it feels like nothing has happened there in 50 years. Then a cow turns up mutilated, and nobody knows what did it. A local hunter, Sung-ki, played by Zo In-sung, calls in his cousin, the police chief, Bum-seok, played by Hwang Jung-min, and the working theory around town is that a tiger has come down from the mountains. They presume it’s a tiger. They just don’t know. So Sung-ki and his fellow hunters head off into the forest to track the thing down, and before long, the hunting party realises that out there in those mountains, they are not the ones doing the hunting. Meanwhile the police chief heads back into town and walks straight into chaos. Stuff is happening, he doesn’t know what it is, and at first he’s completely oblivious. He thinks maybe the tiger has made its way into the streets, until he starts coming across the locals, and realises what they’re dealing with is something far stranger. And here’s the clever bit of the setup. There’s barely any police force around, because big wildfires are burning nearby, so the police, the fire crews and most of the young people are away fighting them. That leaves a skeleton crew in Hope Harbor, and when the fires take out the village’s communications, there’s no outside help coming. Nobody’s riding to the rescue. It’s the chief and his rookie deputy, Sung-ae, played by Hoyeon, who you’ll absolutely recognise from Squid Game, piecing this thing together on their own. I won’t go too deep into what they actually find, because it’s much better discovered on screen, but I’ll say this much. The animal attack is not an animal attack, and the visitors responsible are not from around here. Not from this planet, in fact.

Where the Money Went, and Where It Didn’t

Let’s talk about what works, because when Hope works, it really works. There are some amazing set pieces in this movie and some really, really fun action sequences. It’s constant chasing, constant movement, and you will be on the edge of your seat. The scenes through the forest are very, very cool, and the visual effects on the alien spacecraft are really, really good. When the hunters come across the smaller craft out in the forest, that moment looks fantastic: the design, the scale, the way it sits in the landscape. The bigger picture stuff, the environments, the set pieces, the hardware, all of it looks absolutely brilliant. You can see where that record-breaking money went.

And then, and I’m sorry, but this is where I draw the line, because this is where the movie fell flat on its face for me, it looks like they went and got a preschooler to do the visual effects for the actual aliens. I wish I was joking. The first time we properly meet one, with the police chief chasing it through the town and some of the older villagers joining in behind him, it looks like a long-headed stick figure. It looks superimposed onto the screen. And it pulls you straight out of the movie, because one second you’re getting these incredible chases and gorgeous photography, and the next you’re smacked in the face with something that looks unfinished. And unfortunately, that same level of visual effects carries across every physical alien we meet, and I counted about four or five of them. Here’s the part that really stings. Those aliens are played by Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton. That is a seriously impressive international cast, and the parts they’re attached to look terrible. I don’t know how it happened. It’s like they spent the entire budget on everything else, forgot to do the aliens, and then had to rush back and slap something together at the end. If they had nailed that one element, I’d be sitting here telling you about a brilliant movie.

The human cast, on the other hand, is doing exactly what it should. Hwang Jung-min is one of the most reliable leading men in Korean cinema. If you’ve seen Veteran or The Spy Gone North, you know exactly what he brings, that mix of gruff, funny and quietly decent, and he anchors this whole film as the overwhelmed small-town chief. Hoyeon is great alongside him too, and it’s nice seeing her get a big physical role on film after Squid Game made her a star. And that international alien ensemble is a fascinating group on paper. Fassbender and Vikander are married in real life, they met making The Light Between Oceans, so there’s a fun bit of trivia in them turning up here as extraterrestrials together. And this isn’t even Fassbender’s first visit to this corner of the genre: he played David the android in Prometheus and Alien Covenant, and he’s genuinely unnerving in those. Taylor Russell is one of the most exciting young actors working right now. If you haven’t seen Waves or Bones and All, add both to your list. And Cameron Britton was unforgettable as Ed Kemper in Mindhunter. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the film buries that talent under effects work that doesn’t do any of them justice. While we’re connecting threads: if the first half of this movie scratches an itch for you, the small-town Korean creature feature done right is The Host, from Bong Joon-ho, made 20 years ago on a fraction of this budget, with a creature that still holds up better than what we get here. And the comparison I kept coming back to was Nope, from Jordan Peele, which understood something Hope doesn’t. Sometimes the less you show of your visitor, the scarier and more convincing it stays.

The Logic, and That Ending

I can’t wrap up without talking about the logic, and the ending. A few elements just didn’t make sense to me. When the aliens move, they always look like they’re going ten times faster than whoever they’re chasing, on foot, in a car, doesn’t matter. They look like they’re moving at the speed of light… and yet they never actually catch anybody. I didn’t understand it visually and I didn’t understand it logically. We do eventually learn the aliens are searching for their young, and from there the whole thing swells from a monster hunt into something much bigger and near-apocalyptic, which I was on board for. And then comes the ending, and I’m going to be straight with you, it’s probably the worst ending I’ve seen in a long time. Without giving away the specifics, the final stretch introduces brand new imagery, brand new arrivals, and a conversation between two of the visitors that explains absolutely nothing. Not who they are, not what they want, not what happens to Hope Harbor. Nothing. And then it just… finishes. Now, Na Hong-jin has reportedly already written a sequel, so clearly this is all by design, and if that follow-up gets made, hopefully they jump straight back in there, and fingers bloody crossed they spend a bit more money on the alien effects this time. But a sequel you might get one day doesn’t fix the movie you watched tonight, and tonight, that ending left me cold.

But look, that’s just how Hope landed for me, on my couch, on this particular night. Movies are subjective, and what pulled me out of this one might not bother you in the slightest. Maybe you’ll watch that stick figure sprint through Hope Harbor and feel nothing but the thrill of the chase, and honestly, I hope you do, because the ride underneath those effects is a genuinely good one. What works for me may not work for you, and that’s completely okay. If you check it out, come and tell me how it landed for you, because that conversation is what Frame 70 is all about.