Na Hong-jin’s science-fiction extravaganza has stunning wide shots, occasionally unconvincing CGI, sympathetic monsters and an ending that feels suspiciously like the beginning of another film.
Contains major spoilers for Hope (2026), including the aliens’ motivations and the ending.
I Was Looking Forward to This One. Now I’m Not Entirely Sure What I Watched.
I remember seeing the teaser trailer for Hope and thinking this was exactly the sort of film I wanted to watch. Something had clearly gone very wrong in a remote Korean community. There were hints of an unidentified creature, possibly an alien crash, and the kind of large-scale destruction that suggested we weren’t dealing with an ordinary monster in the woods. Best of all, the trailer managed to make me curious without explaining the entire plot.
Then I noticed Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender were involved. I’ve enjoyed both actors in other films, and seeing them attached to a Korean science-fiction production was intriguing. I wasn’t quite sure how they would fit into the story, but assumed the film would eventually explain that. I’ve now watched all two hours and forty minutes and have a rather peculiar problem: I liked it, quite a lot, but I’m also confused. Not in the satisfying way where the pieces settle into place once the credits roll. More in the sense of wondering whether I’d somehow skipped a crucial scene, or started watching the first instalment of a trilogy without anybody mentioning it.
A Small Village, an Enormous Problem
The film is set in Hope Harbor, an isolated settlement near the Korean Demilitarised Zone. That’s a more interesting starting point than the usual American city full of soldiers, scientists and government officials speaking urgently into headsets. Here we have a local police outpost, older residents, hunters and people whose immediate concerns probably have very little to do with extraterrestrial intelligence.
Police chief Go Bum-seok, played by Hwang Jung-min, and officer Lim Sung-ae, played by Hoyeon, are confronted with evidence of an unusually violent creature. Nearby, Sung-ki, played by Zo In-sung, and a group of hunters head into the wilderness. Communications are down, reinforcements have been diverted to fight wildfires, and the village is left to deal with the problem itself. A mutilated animal offers the first clue, but before long the evidence becomes considerably harder to ignore: wrecked buildings, damaged vehicles and people running for their lives.
For roughly the first fifty minutes, Na Hong-jin lets us see what the creature does rather than what it looks like. We watch people flee, hear impacts and see vehicles become airborne with alarming ease, but the camera refuses to give us a good look at the thing responsible. It’s an approach I appreciated. The original Alien understood that the creature could be more frightening when the audience was left to fill in the details. Once it appears clearly in daylight, the mystery gives way to inspection.
The Wide Shots Are Doing a Lot of the Work
The cinematography is where Hope repeatedly won me over. It doesn’t depend entirely on frantic cutting to convince us that something enormous is happening. Hong Kyung-pyo frequently steps away from the action and gives us the geography of a chase: the distance between the characters, the road they are travelling, and the amount of ground a creature can cover. The forest becomes intimidating precisely because of its scale. You can see people moving through it and understand how little protection the landscape offers.
The vehicle sequences are particularly ambitious. Cars speed along narrow roads, reverse direction, crash into obstacles and somehow continue moving as their surroundings fall to pieces. Sung-ae’s driving becomes one of the film’s most entertaining elements. I spent parts of these scenes paying as much attention to the camera as to the action itself. Having worked with visual material for years, I tend to notice the amount of planning required to make something look spontaneous. There is a great deal of engineering behind this particular sort of chaos, and much of it is genuinely impressive.
Hong Kyung-pyo previously photographed Na’s The Wailing, and the two have returned with something far more technically elaborate. The film’s long tracking shots, difficult stunt coordination and deliberately wide perspectives create a sense of physical momentum that many contemporary blockbusters struggle to match. That’s why the less convincing digital effects stand out so strongly: the world around them looks and feels real.
And Then We Finally See the Aliens
Once the creatures are revealed, the film changes character. What began as a tense rural monster picture becomes a much stranger science-fiction story about several extraterrestrials, their relationships and a conflict that appears to extend far beyond this one village. I liked the shift in principle, but it’s also the point where I began having problems with the CGI.
Some of the creature work is excellent in movement and silhouette, but close-ups don’t always blend naturally with the live-action environments. The surfaces can appear too smooth or too sharply defined, and the eyes, faces and bodies occasionally seem to belong to a different image. I know the film could hardly stage these sequences without digital effects, and there’s clearly a tremendous amount of work involved. It still doesn’t make every shot convincing. When the mystery of the unseen creature has been working so well, the eventual reveal needs to be quite extraordinary.
To his credit, Na has discussed how difficult these effects were, particularly motion blur, performance-capture data and the unforgiving conditions of bright exterior photography. It’s an interesting technical explanation, but my response is still the same: Hope is frequently more frightening when something is about to appear than when it finally does.
The People Caught in the Middle
Bum-seok: A Policeman Who Didn’t Sign Up for This
Hwang Jung-min makes Bum-seok believable because he isn’t some hidden action hero who has finally found his moment. He’s a local police chief trying to maintain control of a situation that’s beyond anything he’s encountered. His confusion, irritation and occasional overconfidence are as important as his bravery. I like that the film allows him to look overwhelmed. That’s probably how most of us would behave if an enormous extraterrestrial began dismantling the neighbourhood.
Sung-ae: The One Person Who Seems to Know What She’s Doing
Hoyeon is particularly good as Sung-ae. She has an alertness that suits the film’s increasingly frantic action, and she doesn’t need a carefully manufactured action-hero backstory before she’s allowed to be capable. Her driving, shooting and quick decisions carry some of the best sequences. After Squid Game, it is interesting to see her in something where so much depends on physical timing rather than stillness or restraint.
Sung-ki: The Hunter Becomes the Hunted
Zo In-sung’s Sung-ki seems, at first, better equipped than most of the village to confront a dangerous animal. He knows the wilderness, carries weapons and knows the people who live there. The film enjoys dismantling that advantage. In the forest, all his experience amounts to very little when the creature doesn’t behave like any prey he knows. Those scenes aren’t especially subtle, but they’re brilliantly staged and often very funny in a distinctly uncomfortable way.
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander: So That Explains It
One of my questions throughout the film was where exactly Fassbender and Vikander had gone. They’re prominent names in the publicity, yet for a long time I couldn’t identify either of them on screen. Were they providing alien voices? Had their likenesses been borrowed for the creatures? Or was there some elaborate cameo waiting at the end? It turns out they performed the extraterrestrials using motion capture, alongside Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton.
Fassbender plays Ma’veyyo, Vikander plays J’aur, Russell is Ai’dovor and Britton is Va’migere. These are not actors simply standing in front of cameras wearing ordinary costumes. Their work has been translated into digital creatures, which explains why I couldn’t recognise them. It’s a fascinating artistic decision, although part of what makes Fassbender and Vikander interesting performers is the subtlety of their actual faces. That subtlety doesn’t always survive the digital translation.
Were They Speaking Swedish?
I also wondered what language the aliens were speaking. For a moment I thought it might be some sort of Swedish, mainly because Vikander is Swedish and I could not identify a single word. That’s a rather poor method of linguistic analysis, admittedly. The language was created specifically for the film with input from linguists, drawing on older linguistic influences rather than being borrowed wholesale from a modern language.
I like that decision. It gives the aliens the suggestion of a life outside the plot, with a civilisation, history and private relationships the villagers know nothing about. More importantly, their incomprehensible dialogue keeps us stuck in the human characters’ position. We see the creatures as incomprehensible aggressors until the film finally lets us consider what they might want.
Maybe the Monsters Weren’t Simply Being Monsters
One of the film’s most important revelations comes when Bum-seok discovers that Yang-bae has killed a small alien creature and preserved the body in a freezer. The child’s name is Kali. Suddenly the violence takes on a different meaning, as does Bum-seok’s earlier observation that one of the creatures appears capable of grief.
Until then, we’ve mostly experienced Hope as a story of people trying to survive an attack. The inhabitants of the village are frightened, armed and quite understandably convinced they are facing monsters. But what if the extraterrestrials have come looking for a child? What if an act of human violence has contributed to the situation rather than simply responded to it? The film doesn’t clearly assign every act of destruction to one single motive, and it doesn’t make the retaliatory killing of innocent people acceptable. It does, however, force a change of perspective.
That becomes the film’s strongest idea. Neither side has the language, patience or understanding to make sense of the other, so fear becomes hostility and hostility becomes something much worse. It’s not a completely new premise for science fiction, but Na gives it a distinctly harsh, chaotic form. There are no comforting ambassadors waiting to arrange a meeting, and the consequences of everyone’s mistaken assumptions are already beyond repair.
The Ending: There Has to Be Another Film, Surely
By the final stretch, the story has expanded from one creature in the countryside to a wider extraterrestrial crisis. The surviving humans are desperately trying to escape, larger forces enter the picture, and then a gigantic vessel appears in the sky. What we’re looking at seems to belong to an entirely different scale of conflict from the one that began with a mutilated animal. I was expecting an explanation, a confrontation or at least some sort of resolution.
Instead the film moves towards Ma’veyyo and J’aur’s concern for Kali. Ma’veyyo removes his own heart, apparently intending to use it to restore the child, and the exchange between the two aliens ends with the suggestion that fate itself might be changed. The child’s revival is not actually completed on screen. Important questions about the aliens, their relationships and the larger catastrophe remain unanswered, and the scene after the credits offers another revelation without bringing the story to anything I’d call a conclusion.
I sat there thinking, hang on, is that it? I don’t object to ambiguous endings. 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t exactly give viewers a convenient instruction manual, and the original Alien wisely leaves most of its cosmic backstory unexplained. But there’s a difference between a film that deliberately preserves mystery and one that stops just as it begins explaining its own mythology. After two hours and forty minutes, I wanted a little more than the promise of another chapter.
Is a Sequel Really Coming?
Na Hong-jin has discussed a continuation and said that he has written more of the story, but that is not the same as a confirmed, funded production. His larger plan is apparently to move beyond the daylight events of this film, potentially spending more time with the aliens’ perspective. That explains why the ending feels the way it does; it doesn’t entirely excuse it. I’ve become rather wary of stories that assume their next instalment will arrive. Streaming cancellations and unfinished cinematic universes have taught me to prefer a film that can stand on its own, even when there’s room for more.
A Decade After The Wailing, Na Hong-jin Goes Cosmic
Na hasn’t exactly made a career of neat, reassuring endings. The Chaser, The Yellow Sea and The Wailing all feature characters who become caught in situations they cannot completely understand or control. Hope, his first feature in roughly a decade, takes that interest and gives it a vast science-fiction canvas. The film premiered in competition at Cannes in 2026, with an original screenplay rather than an adaptation from a book or comic.
Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, production designer Lee Hwo-kyoung, editor Kim Sun-min and composer Michael Abels all contribute to the film’s peculiar combination of grounded local detail and escalating spectacle. The village doesn’t feel like a generic movie set awaiting destruction; it has its own texture, cramped roads, practical buildings and small-town habits. That attention to ordinary life makes the extraordinary events more convincing, even when the creatures themselves do not always manage the same trick.
The Sound of Something You Can’t See
The sound design is another important part of the film’s success. An impact outside the frame, movement somewhere behind a building, or the sound of something charging through the forest can establish a creature’s size before the camera ever reveals it. Michael Abels’ score works with that feeling of pressure. I didn’t leave humming a memorable theme, but the soundtrack, effects and motion are carefully coordinated to keep the audience uncertain and off-balance.
This is why I’d recommend watching the film on a decent-sized screen with good audio, if possible. Its best moments depend on the relationship between what you can see, what you can hear and what you suspect is lurking just beyond the image. On a phone, those wide shots would lose much of their purpose. I don’t usually insist that a film needs a particular screen size, but this one makes a persuasive argument.
A Little Alien, a Little Predator, a Little Something Else
At various points, Hope reminded me of Predator, with armed men discovering that the thing they’re hunting is far better at the job than they are. There is some Tremors in the small-town panic, a little of Bong Joon-ho’s The Host in its mixture of ordinary Korean life and impossible creature violence, and eventually some of the grand mythology of Prometheus. Those associations aren’t accusations of copying. They’re part of the film’s pleasure: Na doesn’t seem particularly worried about keeping his science fiction in a tidy little genre compartment.
The downside is that it keeps becoming another kind of film before the previous one has quite finished. First it’s a creature mystery, then an action extravaganza, then an alien family tragedy, then a much larger cosmic conflict. I enjoyed those changes, but a few of the ideas arrive so late that they feel more like notes for a sequel than fully developed parts of this film.
So, Did I Like It?
Yes, and that’s the strange thing. Despite the uneven CGI, the long running time and that abrupt ending, I enjoyed Hope considerably. There is genuine imagination in the action staging, and the cinematography is often exceptional. I liked the first hour’s careful refusal to show the creature, the wonderfully chaotic car sequences, Hoyeon’s energetic performance and the way the apparent alien invasion gradually becomes a story about grief and misunderstanding.
But I wanted a little more from the ending. Not a complete encyclopaedia of alien civilisation, nor a neat resolution of every loose thread. Just something that made the film I’d been watching feel finished. If Na gets to make his continuation, perhaps this will all look different in retrospect. For now, I’ve seen an impressive, sometimes baffling science-fiction film that seems to end just as it’s about to explain what it’s really about. I’ll almost certainly watch the sequel, if there is one. I’d just rather not wait another ten years.
My rating: 3½ out of 5 stars.
Film and Production References
Production details and credits: Festival de Cannes and NEON. For further context on the action, technology and interpretation, see GQ’s interview, RogerEbert.com and the Los Angeles Times review. Images are credited individually for identification; editorial credit does not itself confer reproduction permission.
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