The best way to go into Na Hong-jin’s Hope is completely blind. Violent, chaotic, and hilarious, Na’s film drops the viewer into North Korea, where we meet the citizens of the small town of Hope Harbor, located not too far from the DMZ. Like any small town, everyone knows everyone, the population is getting older and older, and the police force consists of just a handful of people. It’s a quiet life in Hope Harbor until a dead bull triggers an investigation that leads to a shocking attack by a mysterious monster. Na sets the stage perfectly for his monster movie, throwing the audience headfirst into the suspense as they follow the people trying to get to the bottom of this shocking attack. Jam-packed with action, Hope might just be the most exciting film to come out of Cannes Film Festival this year.
While most sci-fi epics likely won’t leave you laughing until you have tears in your eyes, Hope is genuinely not like the other sci-fi movies. Na employs a lot of situational comedy to Hope in a way that feels natural while also seeming completely ridiculous. From potty humor to slapstick, you’ll easily find yourself giggling in one moment and then jumping from a scare in the next. It’s what makes the film so naturally charming; you not only become invested in the characters, but you’re rooting for them because they’ve endeared themselves to you.
But what makes Hope shine is its action scenes, specifically in the first hour of the film, when the monster attacking the little town is an invisible force. The film centers around police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), as a well-meaning but slightly cowardly defender. We follow Bum-seok as he runs through the wreckage of the town, all the while hearing the horrific screeches of an unseen beast that is killing everything in sight. It’s a sequence that is reminiscent of Cloverfield, but the movie eventually offers one of the best monster reveals of all time as the creature emerges from the shadows, lanky-limbed, sharp-toothed, and damn near invincible.
Thanks to his rookie, Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), they manage to actually put up a decent fight against this relentless terror, and the scenes that play throughout this sequence consist of long shots speeding down streets from a police car and a healthy amount of gunfire and explosives. While some of the special effects for the monsters are wonky in the film — the seams show the most in these scenes when the camera closes in on them — the design is creepy enough to illicit full-body chills when you see one of them charging at you at top speed. Yes, you read that correctly, there’s more than one of these monsters. And when Sung-ae and Bum-seok find that out, their little problem gets ten times worse.
Hope boasts an impressive cast of Hollywood names like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton, but their appearance is not what you might expect; in fact, you might not even notice them at first glance. The true talent on screen lies with the people of the small town. Hwang’s turn as Bum-seok is equal parts thrilling and comedic. He excels at physical humor and comedic timing, and he is the protagonist whom we follow throughout the film.
Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.
You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.
The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.
You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.
Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.
The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
Even funnier is when Bum-seok gets to play off of Jung’s Sung-ae. She might be younger and lower in rank, but the biggest badass title goes to her, with her arrival on screen being one of the coolest scenes in the movie. Jung, who gained international fame after starring in Squid Game in Season 1, plays the perfect heroine. She’s capable, smart, and thinks fast on her feet. In comparison to Bum-seok’s bumbling ways, she seems almost like a superhero. But that doesn’t mean that she’s the boring straight man; she delivers her own laughs along the way and easily goes toe-to-toe with Hwang in these silly moments.
Also a highlight of the film is Zo In-sung, who plays Sung-ki, a local hunter and cousin to Bum-seok. He’s the typical swaggering cool guy, but spends most of the movie tracking the monsters through the woods. When the action finally hits him, Zo shines even when he’s playing off of characters who are covered in VFX. His best scenes are when he’s paired up with Hwang, and while the third act has its faults, one particular scene in the middle of a high-speed chase shows that Zo can easily meet Na’s standard for action and comedy.
The problem of Hope lies in the second half of the film. While the first part is tightly shot and contained in town, the second part of the movie almost feels like an entirely new story. When Fassbender and Vikander step in, the story goes from what feels like an indie horror movie into high-concept sci-fi, bordering on Avatar territory. Unfortunately, this doesn’t do the film any favors because it’s something that’s introduced far too late. It completely switches up the tempo and the tone of the film, feeling shoehorned in as it dumps a bunch of exposition on the audience in the final half hour.
It’s not a surprise that Na is already working on a sequel; the film ends on a pretty major cliffhanger. And, in some ways, that’s necessary. There are a handful of lore plot holes that go completely unexplained, and the introduction of a new aspect of the story means that the scope of the film has widened immensely. Couple this late-stage twist with the fact that the final action sequences simply drag on for far too long, and it’s a disappointing end for a genuinely entertaining movie. The sad thing is, Hope could have been a near-perfect film had it abandoned its desire to go even bigger and simply stuck to the creature feature that made its first half so entertaining. While it’s obviously too soon to judge Na’s sequel, for now it might be better to simply enjoy the film for the action that it offers and ignore the more extreme sci-fi elements that feel a bit too ham-fisted to actually work.
](/tag/movie/hope-2026/) ‘Hope’ excels at combining action and comedy in a sci-fi epic, but it stumbles in the third act when it tries to grow too big too fast.
Hope is a 2026 film set in the remote harbor town of Hope Harbor, near the Demilitarized Zone. The story unfolds as a mysterious discovery in the area intensifies into a larger enigma, compelling the town’s inhabitants to face an ominous and unfathomable threat.