The Korean sci-fi movie Hope holds off an unusually long time before showing the monster that’s running amok in a small town somewhere in South Korea. It’s about 45 minutes before the audience sees more than a glimpse of a creature, piecing together along the way that it’s tall, fast, and fearsome, and able to annihilate people, vehicles, and chunks of buildings in its terrible wake. But more remarkable than this restraint is how little Hope reveals about itself when the creature does appear. That revelation has a certain strange majesty; the creature is perhaps closer to a godlike or ghostlike figure than the feral beast its destruction might imply, and even some ropey CG used to depict it manages to feel part and parcel with its uncanny qualities. There’s a sense of genuine awe and mystery that so many Cloverfield-variant creatures have failed to summon using technically superior effects work. Yet once the creature is out there, even after Hope has branched off into several subplots from its initial circular chase, Na Hong-jin’s supersized mutation of a modern blockbuster remains elusive. Just what the hell is this thing, anyway?
What it’s not is a slow burn, despite the 156-minute running time. Though Hope involves some degree of deconstruction—Hong-jin’s previous film from a decade ago, The Wailing, has an identical length and drew raves for its unpredictable take on the horror genre—much of its first hour sends a camera whipping around the wreckage of this ill-fated town as police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) arrives on the scene, too late and too small to restore order but determined to help whoever he can. He’s joined by Sung-ae (Hoyeon), a scrappy and gung-ho rookie; on foot and in cars, they both hurtle through the cluttered roads at breakneck speeds, sometimes appearing torn between running from the creature and speeding toward it in attack. They do discover that, for all of its destructive power, the poor thing can’t corner for shit. Meanwhile, Bum-seok’s cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) leads a hunting party through the nearby woods. Will they find the town-wrecking creature’s lair? Other monsters like it? Something else entirely?
To do more than hint at the answers would be unfair to the movie’s considerable sense of discovery—though it’s no kind of spoiler to note that Sung-ki and his group are not nearly as compelling characters as Bum-seok or Sung-ae. Not that the cops on the scene have much more depth, per se; there’s just a built-in immediacy to their insta-action-hero predicament, even though they’re more persistent and lucky than especially heroic, almost as if they expect the narrative to eventually shift in their favor by default. Once the extended sequence in the town comes to an end, they don’t leave the picture, but the story does sprawl out to investigate other aspects of this unusual occurrence, which involves foreign bodies of various shapes and sizes. One such body is subject to a lengthy and difficult autopsy of sorts. Later, there are additional chases, which feel more distended into overkill than the exhilaratingly messy cop-car-versus-creature demolition derbies that feature in the first half. There are also some appearances, in a manner of speaking, from a few English-language movie stars.
Hope is the kind of movie that encourages talking around in. In part that’s because it’s surprising, strange, and entertaining enough to make spoiler avoidance unusually worthwhile. That’s also not the whole story. At times, Hong-jin seems to be making the blockbuster mash-up of his dreams, with elements of movies as disparate as Predator, The Host, and Avatar, and the kind of non-ending bafflement that can only portend hopes of a future trilogy. But the way that Hope realigns and distends its many familiar parts—expanding chase sequences into a kind of existential vastness; allowing sympathies to shift out from under the audience; transposing some well-known faces and voices into bizarre new contexts—feels more purposefully experimental.
Just as this summer’s Disclosure Day entered itself into an immediate conversation with cultural depictions of and assumptions about alien iconography without skimping on the confident whoosh of Spielbergian camerawork, Hope uses its frequent long-runway momentum to disorient the usual creature-feature threats in concert with its genuine thrills. The conflicts go on and on, without necessarily becoming any clearer (or at least while raising more questions rather than providing strict answers). Sometimes, apparently, this means undermining the film’s own velocity in a way that makes the second half of the film drag, leading to an almost comically unsatisfying ending. It’s genuinely difficult to parse whether Hong-jin has franchising in mind, or is attempting to satirize the whole idea that depictions of world-shifting events should provide neat and unambiguous closure. Hope threatens to come unmoored in ways that few sci-fi spectacles do. Frankly, more of them probably should.
Director: Na Hong-jin
Writer: Na Hong-jin
Starring: Hwang Jung-min, Hoyeon, Zo In-sung, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander
Release Date: September 9, 2026
Keep scrolling for more great stories.