Two and a half hours of people running. That is where we have to start with Hope, because Meaghan’s tagline for this movie was “a lesson and the importance of cardio,” and she is not wrong. We sat down for Na Hong-jin’s first film since The Wailing expecting a Korean creature feature, and we got one.
We also got aliens, a warrior who turns into something with too many teeth, an empress, and about ten straight minutes of toilet humor that one of us is never going to let go.
Hope premiered in competition at Cannes back in May, opened in South Korea on July 15, and hit North American theatres on September 9 through Neon. We had heard almost nothing about it before walking in.
No real ad push on this side of the world, no hype cycle, just a vague awareness that the movie existed. Honestly, that is how you should go into this one. Skip the trailer. Neither of us watched a full one, and we are both glad.
The synopsis is thin on purpose: a mysterious discovery is made on the outskirts of a remote harbour town, and the residents find themselves fighting for survival against something they have never encountered before. That is all you need.
What Happens in Hope (2026): A Dead Cow, a Small Town, and the DMZ
The setup is 1980s South Korea, in a small fishing village called Hope Harbor sitting close to the border with the North. You see the evidence of that location all the way through, and the town itself is tiny. Mostly elderly residents, shabby little storefronts, and nobody with a cell phone.
Police chief Ko Bum-seok gets a call from his second cousin, Ko Sung-ki, about a cow that has been torn apart. A bear, maybe. A tiger, maybe. Nobody is sure. Then he starts getting more calls on his car radio as he drives back into town, and the picture gets worse fast.
Sung-ki takes his crew of hunting buddies up into the mountains to track whatever this thing is, and that is where the “wild animal” theory falls apart completely. It walks through a concrete building like the wall is not there. It throws cars ten or fifteen feet into the air, at people. Not a tiger. Definitely not a bear.
What surprised us both is how quickly the action kicks off. We assumed a small-scale village siege movie. Hope is not that. It gets big, and it gets big early.
The Creature Reveal: Hope Shows You the Monsters in Broad Daylight
Here is the thing we loved most, and it is the reason this movie earns a lot of goodwill from us even when it stumbles. Hope is not one of those creature features where everything is pitch black, and the monster gets a tenth of a second of screen time before the cut.
These creatures are out in broad daylight. There are close-ups. There are slow-motion shots. Different designs for each of them, all fully visible, all clearly the product of a lot of work.
It does take a while to get there. Somewhere around the forty-minute mark before you see the first one properly, and we were both starting to sweat it. Meaghan said she was right on the cusp:
If it hadn’t have shown up in the next five minutes I would have been like, oh, this movie is too long.
It saved itself just in time.
And the reveal is cool. It also sent us in completely wrong directions. Meaghan thought sirens, something sea-based, like the kelpies from Harry Potter. Arthur was betting on Korean mythology, the town angering something old and something old crawling out of the water in response.
Nope. Aliens. Four of them, all different, all sort of elemental. One looks like a tree. One looks like a sea creature:
Like a mermaid sort of, but not really, like an ugly mermaid.
One looks like a lizard, kind of. And when one of them transforms mid-movie, it stops being a monster movie entirely. Arthur’s reaction in the theatre was basically his jaw hitting the floor. Meaghan clocked the transformed version as feeling a lot like the creatures from A Quiet Place.
Some of the CG does not hold up, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The highway chase sequence has a few shots that made us wince, and a couple of the running sequences had us genuinely asking whether it was on purpose. Regardless of that, the creature design is Arthur’s number one thing about the whole film.
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Who Plays the Aliens in Hope: Fassbender, Vikander, and an Invented Language
This is where the cast list goes sideways in the best way. Michael Fassbender plays Ma’veyyo, the warrior. Alicia Vikander (his real-life wife, and yes, the robot from Ex Machina) plays J’aur, the empress. Taylor Russell plays Ai’dovor, the lizard-looking one. Cameron Britton plays Va’migere, the sea creature one, and if you watched Mindhunter, you know exactly who that is. He played Ed Kemper, brilliantly, and he is also in Umbrella Academy.
None of them speak Korean or English. The aliens have their own dialect built for the film, subtitled throughout, and it was reportedly constructed off Mongolian and actually spoken by the actors rather than manufactured after the fact. We loved that detail.
Their story is the thing Hope holds back the longest. You learn that there were six of them, or at least room for six, that came down on a ship that crashed on Earth a long time ago (the foliage growing out of the wreck is a nice quiet clue that they have been there a while). You learn there is a child involved. You learn there is a whole empress-and-heir political situation happening off-world, and that a mothership is coming down.
Meaghan’s third favourite thing about the film is that through line: the aliens are not tearing Hope Harbor apart for sport. They are looking for a missing kid. Of course they are levelling the town. That is a prince.
That reframing is probably why this stops being a monster movie and becomes an alien movie, and it does something uncomfortable to your loyalties. Meaghan said it out loud partway through:
I don’t know if I’m gonna be on the alien side by the end of this movie, guys.
The Cast of Hope: Smart Characters Who Come Prepared
Hwang Jung-min plays Bum-seok, and he is Meaghan’s number two. He is delightfully overly exuberant and completely befuddled by everything happening around him, which is fair, because nobody has seen anything like this in their life. He is scared. He hesitates. He does the wrong thing at a terrible moment (the butcher scene; we are still recovering). He feels like a real person instead of a guy who grabs a shotgun and becomes a hero in Act Two. Hwang Jung-min is apparently one of South Korea’s highest-grossing actors of all time, which tracks.
Hoyeon plays rookie officer Im Sung-ae, and she rules. By the book, righteous, constantly telling people they cannot do what they are about to do. She also shows up armed to the teeth with assault rifles and a grenade launcher, and she uses that grenade launcher a lot. That is Arthur’s third favourite thing: people in this movie make smart decisions. Nobody is defending the town with a kitchen knife. They come prepared, they think, and they still mostly die horribly.
Then there is Yang-bae, the local weirdo with the freezer, played by Eum Moon-suk. He has a backyard full of posed mannequins in clothes and makeup, which had us convinced he was a serial killer for a solid stretch. Meaghan’s verdict:
Buffalo Bill would have been at home, let me tell you.
We will also note the movie has a pretty loose relationship with human durability. One character takes a spine injury, cracked ribs, and a head injury, and is later leaning out of a car firing a grenade launcher. “What are you? Superman?“
What Doesn’t Work in Hope: Pacing, Toilet Humor, and a Late Lore Drop
The middle sags. That is the honest read from both of us, and it is the main thing dragging our scores down. There is a long stretch of characters talking and trying to piece together what is going on, and we could have lost a chunk of it without missing anything. Meaghan’s fix is a good one: this could have been a five-episode TV series, and it would have breathed properly.
The other problem is the humor, or one specific piece of it. A lot of the banter between characters works fine. We were both on board for the general silliness, because Hope is not taking itself too seriously and that suits a creature feature. But there is a bit that runs on far too long, and Meaghan is never coming back from it. Arthur called it “almost poop jokes.” Meaghan corrected him:
It wasn’t almost. There were poop jokes for ten minutes straight.
If it had been a running gag referenced two or three times, fine. Instead, it takes over a section of the movie.
The last complaint is the lore dump. Almost everything you learn about who these aliens are and why they are here arrives in the final stretch of the film, and Meaghan hit her limit right around the moment she realised the credits were coming. Arthur has more patience for it, partly because this is how a lot of sci-fi is built (we had the same argument after Home Bodies, which had the same problem). It is also, for him, the thing that makes a sequel appealing.
Give me my answers. I want my elephant. That’s a Simpsons joke.
For what it is worth, a sequel does seem to be the plan. The general shape of the story is apparently already written, but it is such an enormous undertaking that it is not happening immediately. Na Hong-jin originally wanted to tell all of this in one movie, which would have run something close to five hours, and a lot was already cut. That explains the pacing more than anything else does.
Our Hope Ratings, Scare Factor, and Why Asian Creature Features Keep Winning
On the digs, Arthur landed at a 6. Meaghan started at 6.5, then reconsidered and slid down toward a 6 or a 5.5 once the middle section caught up with her. Neither of those is a bad time. We both had fun. It is just a film with real issues sitting next to real ambition.
For the mood rating, Hope is fun and wild, and light on scares. There is plenty of carnage and some very good practical work, but it moves fast and loose rather than building sustained dread. It won’t keep you up at night.
The question we set ourselves for this episode was whether Asia is one of the only places keeping action movies interesting right now. Our answer is yes, especially on the creature front. A lot of Western action lately is fine, and fine is the problem. The Transformers movies kept getting made largely on the strength of their Asian box office; Pacific Rim was the same story, and Godzilla Minus Zero is stomping into IMAX this November. They love this kind of movie over there, and they have the formula down.
Next week: Resident Evil. Stay scared and stay tuned.
Hope (2026)
Directed by Na Hong-jin · 157 min · R
A butchered cow on a quiet road pulls police chief Ko Bum-seok into the worst day Hope Harbor has ever had. Na Hong-jin's first film since The Wailing is a Korean creature feature with real carnage, monsters shown in broad daylight, and a scope that keeps growing until the small town siege becomes something much stranger.