‘Hope’ Review: Na Hong-jin Goes for Broke With a Wild, Ambitious Genre Spectacle
Few genre films arrived in 2026 carrying the expectations surrounding Hope. Na Hong-jin’s return behind the camera was always going to attract attention after The Wailing, a film that remains one of the defining Korean supernatural thrillers of its era. But Hope promised something considerably different. Monsters, science fiction, action, comedy and period drama all collide in a film operating on a much larger scale.
For a substantial portion of its runtime, that ambition pays off.
Na introduces Hope as a small South Korean harbor town suddenly confronted with an event unlike anything its residents have experienced. One of the movie’s greatest strengths is how quickly the location feels like a place that existed before we arrived. There are relationships, personalities and histories already moving through the community, allowing the larger genre elements to intrude upon an established world rather than one constructed solely to accommodate them.
That approach makes the first half especially effective. Na takes his time with the town and its residents while gradually increasing the scale of what is happening around them. There is an almost overwhelming amount of personality packed into the film, with local authorities, residents and outsiders all reacting differently as an increasingly inexplicable situation develops.
The distinctly Korean tonal shifts are also fully intact. Characters can become intensely emotional before the movie suddenly pivots toward comedy, sometimes even as circumstances become increasingly dire. Anyone familiar with Korean genre cinema or television will recognize the rhythm immediately. Hope embraces those swings rather than smoothing them out for an international audience.
The ensemble helps make that work. Hwang Jung-min, reuniting with Na after The Wailing, is among the familiar faces anchoring the chaos, while Zo In-sung also delivers a standout performance. The movie needs actors capable of maintaining its heightened emotional register because almost everything surrounding them eventually becomes enormous.
And enormous is probably the best way to describe Hope once it fully reveals itself.
Big guns. Big explosions. Big creatures. Big action sequences. There are cops, locals, mysterious figures, stories passed through older generations and an escalating science-fiction mystery running underneath everything. At different moments, the movie can evoke a monster film, action spectacle, science-fiction thriller and eccentric ensemble comedy. There are even sequences where comparisons to something like Transformers or Jurassic Park become understandable, particularly in the way enormous nonhuman characters must physically interact with people and their surroundings.
It is an exhausting movie, but often intentionally so. Na keeps pushing forward, stacking genres and ideas on top of one another until Hope becomes a kind of maximalist genre experiment.
Unfortunately, the element that should push the movie over the top is also where it begins losing some of its effectiveness.
The creatures themselves are going to be a major dividing point.
Their abilities and behavior make sense within what the film establishes, and the technical interaction between the creatures, human characters and physical environment is frequently impressive. They feel present within the action rather than disconnected from it.
The problem is the actual creature design.
Considering how carefully constructed much of Hope feels, the monsters themselves needed another level of refinement. Their appearance never quite matches the imagination surrounding their behavior or the world Na has created for them. There are moments where the design recalls the increasingly exaggerated creature work of the later Resident Evil films, and viewers who struggled with that particular aesthetic may encounter similar issues here.
That matters because Hope spends its first half building considerable anticipation around what is happening. Once the creatures become a more tangible part of the movie, their design becomes impossible to separate from the experience.
The narrative also becomes less assured as the film begins providing more information.
What initially feels mysterious and carefully layered starts moving much faster as explanations emerge. Some ideas that seem fascinating during the setup don’t receive the same degree of development later, creating the impression that the film has accumulated more concepts than it ultimately knows how to resolve.
Fortunately, the movie never loses its energy.
The action remains effective, the performances continue carrying the increasingly chaotic circumstances, and the humor that gave the first half so much personality remains present. Na’s ability to orchestrate large-scale sequences is evident throughout, particularly when characters and creatures are moving through the same physical spaces.
That makes Hope frustrating in an unusual way. This isn’t a film that struggles to find something interesting to do. It arguably has too much.
For much of the first half, Hope feels like it could become something exceptional. The world-building, performances, escalating mystery and willingness to jump between genres create exactly the kind of unpredictable experience its premise promises. There is a genuine sense that almost anything could happen next.
The second half simply doesn’t capitalize on all of that potential at the same level. The creature designs become a persistent distraction, while the mythology and explanations surrounding them feel less developed than the mystery that preceded them.
Still, falling short of extraordinary doesn’t make Hope unsuccessful.
Na Hong-jin has made an ambitious, frequently funny and enormously entertaining genre mashup that refuses to stay inside any single box. Its biggest swings don’t always connect, but there is enough imagination, spectacle and personality here to make the experience worthwhile.
I wanted Hope to be a five-star movie. For a while, it genuinely felt like it might be.
It doesn’t quite get there, but the ride getting there is still one worth taking.
3.5 out of 5
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