Hope Review: Na Hong-jin's Korean Monster Epic Peaks in Its First Hour

Hope (2026) is worth watching for its first hour, which is one of the most exhilarating stretches of action in recent Korean cinema. The rest is a different proposition. Na Hong-jin's creature epic, his first feature since The Wailing, turned a village near the DMZ into a war zone and then kept turning, and it opened in US cinemas through Neon on September 9, 2026 after premiering in competition at Cannes in May. The problems arrive after the hour mark. The creature's CGI stutters, the characters stop existing, and the last ten minutes hand out lore without resolution.

The scale is the story here. IndieWire's David Ehrlich reported that Hope is the most expensive film ever made in Korea, with a rumored budget of about 50 billion won, and Empire's Harry Stainer wrote that it "has made headlines as South Korea's most expensive movie of all time". Critics mostly liked the gamble. Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 79 percent from 177 reviews, and Metacritic sits at 67 from 37 critic reviews.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it, and see it in a cinema if you can. A 157-minute Korean science fiction horror from Na Hong-jin with Hwang Jung-min, Hoyeon and Michael Fassbender. Rotten Tomatoes says 79 percent from 177 critic reviews. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Hope (2026) is about

First, the disambiguation, because the title is useless on its own. Three films have been called Hope. The 2021 Norwegian drama and the 2013 Korean film are not this one. This is the 2026 South Korean science fiction horror film directed by Na Hong-jin, the director of The Chaser and The Wailing, and its original Korean title is 호프 (Hopeu). It played in South Korean cinemas from July 15, 2026, ran the festival circuit through New York, Melbourne, Toronto and Zurich, and opened in the United States on September 9, 2026.

The village is Hope Harbor, close enough to the demilitarised zone to be lined with signs telling residents not to trust strangers, and most of the people living in it are old. Police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is called out to a dead cow with gaping wounds lying in the middle of the road. His cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) and a hunting party take the forest to track whatever did it.

Bum-seok gets back to town to find the place already cut open, buildings with holes punched through them and bodies in the alleyways, and something running through it that kills people and cars in the same breath. The creature itself stays out of sight for almost an hour, and Bum-seok spends that time chasing it on foot and in a patrol car while officer Im Sung-ae (Hoyeon) keeps up. It is finally shown, then hit by a grenade launcher, and then run down by a tanker, and the film lets you think the business is finished. Meanwhile the hunting party goes deeper into the mountains, which is where the answers and the worst of it both are. The film plays this as a monster picture for most of its length and then, in the last stretch, reveals that the creature feature was the setup for something much larger.

Cast and performances

Hwang Jung-min is the reason to watch the first hour, and the reason the second half hurts. Stainer in Empire described what the performance does: "Hwang's initial gruff exterior soon makes way to reveal an officer floundering and in way over his head." He runs a police station in a town nobody young lives in, chases something he cannot outgun, and the camera keeps finding him a step behind a disaster he can hear but cannot reach.

Hoyeon is the find of the film. Im Sung-ae is a police officer who also happens to be trained for field hospitals, and she spends the opening hour firing a grenade launcher and handling a rifle like someone who has used both. Stainer's read is the best one written: "it is Hoyeon, who enters the film firing off a grenade-launcher, who cements herself as an action star here, balancing the film's more tender moments while being equally convincing firing off thousands of rifle rounds." Zo In-sung plays Sung-ki as a man who is competent and completely certain, which is what makes his hunting party so easy to follow and so easy to lose.

The aliens are played by four actors who mostly have to stand there and be looked at. Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton arrive late in the film and stay through its last stretch. Stainer noticed the effect of the casting rather than the performances: "Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander rock up at one point and make jaw-to-the-floor appearances."

What works

The first hour. Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com filed his review from the Cannes premiere and wrote that "the first hour of 'Hope' rips". It is the correct verdict. The chase through the wrecked village is built on long tracking shots that stay level with Bum-seok as he runs, and Daniels said they are "so smooth it's difficult to figure out how Na and his cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo pulled them off". Empire's Stainer put the same feeling in a different key: "Not since Mad Max: Fury Road has a film slammed its foot down on the accelerator so hard."

The chaos. The film keeps switching registers mid-sentence, from a car chase to a joke to something unbearable, and it never explains the joke. Stainer: "It's an insane two-and-a-half-hour monster movie with a brutal 'how-the-hell-did-they-film-that?' foot-to-horse-to-car extended chase, a serious lengthy monologue about diarrhoea (which is a crucial plot point), and, to top it all off, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander rock up at one point." Na's provincial Korea is a real place too, with its own signposts and its own boredom, and Scott Tobias in The Reveal noticed that the "zeal with which Na combines wild tonal shifts with a genuine affection for provincial characters is as present here as it was in The Wailing".

The restraint. The creature stays off screen for almost an hour, and Daniels said it takes that long "to see the creature causing mayhem" in the town. The hour of wreckage that comes before it is the best action in the film, and nothing after it is as sharp.

What doesn't

The creature. The effects are the weakest thing in the picture. Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times wrote that "the rickety CGI not its strong suit, 'Hope' never quite follows through on its crafty first hour of peekaboo velocity". Ehrlich in IndieWire went further and called them "some of the worst creature effects this side of the Syfy Channel or 'The Mummy Returns'". Stainer in Empire still made it the film's one caveat, that you have to get past "its less-than-perfect CGI".

The second half. Daniels: the last two-thirds of the film "seemingly lose all momentum", because action sequences that produce no new information "can feel repetitive", and there are chases that "stretch on for far too long". Stainer saw it as a structural problem: "A lore-heavy final ten minutes makes clear this is only Part 1, and may leave some viewers questioning what on earth they just saw."

The characters. Daniels is blunt about it: "Every character here is seemingly underwritten. We barely find out anything about any of them." He also noticed the camera changing its mind about who the hero is, shooting Hwang's Bum-seok in hero shots for the first hour and then pulling back and shooting him like an anybody for the rest of the film. David Sims in The Atlantic felt the size of the thing the whole way through: "The entire time I was watching it, I had one overriding feeling: Everything could perhaps be a little bit smaller."

What audiences say

Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 79 percent from 177 reviews and the Popcornmeter at 77 percent from more than 500 verified ratings. Metacritic's critic split is 65 percent positive, 30 percent mixed and 5 percent negative across 37 reviews, with a user score of 6.1 from 77 ratings. IMDb has the film at 6.7 from 21,000 votes. Letterboxd has the member average at 3.19 from 180,756 ratings and 98,847 written reviews. TMDB has it at 6.89 from 280 votes. Every figure in this section was checked on October 21, 2026.

Where to watch Hope (2026)

There is no subscription streaming for the film in the United States. JustWatch checked 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026 and lists it as a digital purchase or rental on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home, plus a rental on Plex, and it says plainly that there are no free streaming options. TMDB's US provider list agrees. The digital release was October 13, 2026. It played in British cinemas from September 25, 2026 and in India from the same date, on TMDB's calendar. The US certificate is R and the runtime is 157 minutes. Watch the listing carefully on any streaming site, because JustWatch and the search engines are full of the other two films called Hope.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Hope streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Hope worth watching? Yes, and in a cinema, because a lot of what works in it is the sound and the scale and those two things do not survive a phone screen. Na Hong-jin has made the most entertaining Korean monster film in years and then let the monster disappear from his own movie, because the second hour has nothing to replace it. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus calls it "an unhinged sci-fi epic that boasts awe-inspiring production design and amusingly quaint visual effects", which is a fair description of both halves. The 3.19 on Letterboxd says the people who logged the film were not sure they had been had. Take the first hour. It is worth the ticket on its own.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Hope

The film's biggest turn is the freezer. Yang-bae, the carpenter in Hope Harbor, shot a small alien in the forest before any of this started and kept the body in his chest freezer. Bum-seok finds it there and assaults him over it. He also draws his own conclusion from what he has seen. The creature tearing through the village is a parent searching for a lost child, and an autopsy has shown that the aliens are anatomically close to humans. The film never confirms that the one wrecking the village is the parent of the one in the freezer, and the child does not come back.

The hunt for the ship is where the film spends its last reserves. Sung-ki's hunting party finds the aliens' craft in the forest and opens a floor into the space beneath it. They are ambushed, and every one of them dies except Sung-ki, who escapes on horseback with Ma'veyyo close behind him in a four-legged form. Bum-seok and Im Sung-ae fire from the patrol car while Yang-bae drives, trying to pull Sung-ki off the horse into the vehicle. Sung-ki maneuvers himself onto the car, gets hold of the grenade launcher and puts a grenade into the alien's open mouth. Then a roadside sign catches him as he hangs out of the window and swipes him off the side of the moving car, and Bum-seok is left holding his shoe. Asked why he turned the wheel, Yang-bae says a cat ran into the road. No cat appears on screen, he does not slow down, and he shows nothing.

A large alien warship then comes down in the atmosphere, hits a distant mountain and explodes. The shockwave wrecks the patrol car. Ma'veyyo survives the grenades, finds J'aur, and they watch it burn. He tells her the child has very little time left, then cuts his own heart out by hand and says that if they find it he will use the heart to revive it, and that doing so will change the fate of all of them. J'aur answers that what she can see is not evidence and that what she wants has not yet happened, and tells him to change fate. That is the last line of dialogue in the film. Sung-ae, watching the wreck, calls Sung-ki's death a twist of fate.

Bum-seok, Sung-ae, Nak-yeon and Yang-bae take what they can carry and walk back toward the village. Sung-ae asks what they should do and Bum-seok says he does not know. She proposes moving the remaining villagers into the school and fortifying it, and he agrees, then tells her to stop talking because he cannot breathe. The film ends on a crosscut between the burning mountain, the aliens watching it, and the four of them running for the village. Yang-bae is the only one of them left physically unharmed.

Midway through the end credits there is one more scene. An empty road with the cast names over it, the sound of someone walking and breathing hard, and Sung-ki, alive, one shoe missing, the barrel of his rifle bent, using it as a walking stick as he limps up the road. The word HOPE fills the screen, the same title card the film opened on.