Exact numbers have yet to be confirmed, but Na Hong-jin’s “Hope” is reportedly the most expensive movie ever made in Korea, with a rumored budget of ₩50 billion (which only translates to about $33 million USD). Whatever this 160-minute blockbuster actually cost, it was both way too much and not nearly enough — too much for a trite and tedious bumpkins vs. monsters saga that only has the creative propulsion to sustain itself for about 45 minutes, and not enough to spare it from some of the worst creature effects this side of the Syfy Channel or “The Mummy Returns.” I know CGI hasn’t come a long way since the start of the century, but it’s absolutely wild to see Michael Fassbender get his own Scorpion King moment in the year of our lord 2026 (and in the main Competition at Cannes, no less!).
Of course, it’s fitting that a contemporary movie called “Hope” should kick off with an unparalleled jolt of excitement, only to fade so fast — and with such soul-sucking force — that you ultimately feel like an idiot for ever believing in a better outcome. But in my defense, and possibly your own some day, the first third of Na’s latest feature delivers on every scrap of scattered promise that he offered with “The Wailing,” “The Yellow Sea,” and “The Chaser” before it. Imagine if the run for your lives! havoc unleashed in “The Host” or “The War of the Worlds” was stretched out for the better part of an hour and shot with the cartoonishly operatic spectacle of the Paris sequence from “Mission: Impossible — Fallout.” Now imagine how bad the rest of “Hope” must be for a movie that starts like that to become such a massive disappointment by the end.
It begins with a dead cow in the middle of the road. That would be enough to pass for a big news day in the backwater port town of Hope (which is close enough to the DMZ to be surrounded by landmines and festooned with posters warning people to look out for spies), but the plot thickens when some local hunters notice that the carcass — clawed by something huge but otherwise intact — reeks of old fish. Power-tripping local police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is convinced he’s looking at evidence of a rare tiger attack, and dispatches the hunters to go poke around the area’s forested mountains for clues.
But our man barely makes it back into town before he realizes that he’s dealing with a beast of a different size. The gaping hole in the side of Hope’s real estate office is his first clue. The series of obliterated human corpses strewn across the town’s narrow alleyways are his second; not for nothing, but “Hope” is one of the only genre movies whose post-slaughter portrayal worthy of being compared to the Grey Fox hallway sequence from “Metal Gear Solid.”
What follows is a spellbinding and gleefully frenetic mega-setpiece that finds Bum-seok chasing after — and just as often running away from — whatever godforsaken force has turned his small town into a warzone. Supported by the bright daytime splendor of Hong Kyung-pyo’s widescreen cinematography, Na elegantly choreographs the larger-than-life catastrophe one street at a time, each intersection of Hope confronting its hapless police chief with another desperate villager, projectile car door, or disembodied roar. I couldn’t possibly count the number of ceramic tiles that break apart before our eyes, but the sheer tactility that Na achieves by shooting with tangible elements on real locations should be a major wake-up call that it’s time for Hollywood to turn down the Volume.
Likewise, the immaculate sense of escalation that Na achieves here should be studied by action directors around the world for decades to come, in large part because its every fiery explosion and dismembered body deepens our understanding of Bum-seok’s sense of duty — or lack thereof. Na’s script even manages to introduce a few other major characters along the way (namely Jung Ho-yeon’s Sung-ae, a chipper young cop whose fresh-faced beauty belies her love for large machine guns), and weave in a running joke about how all of the old-timers in Hope are armed to the teeth and ready to defend it from… whatever.
“Whatever” indeed! At heart, the euphoric first hour of “Hope” is an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, as the monster always manages to flee the scene just before Bum-seok arrives. When we, at last, get our first good look at the creature after 45 minutes or so, it’s enough to immediately understand why Na tried to hide it from us for so long (and enough to immediately wish that he hid it from us for a whole lot longer, perhaps stretching out the scarier when unseen “Jaws” approach for the rest of the movie).
I have been confronted with any number of galling CGI monstrosities in recent years, most of them in mega-budget Hollywood movies that failed to provide their overworked, underpaid effects teams the resources they needed to get the job done (which may well have been the situation faced here by the Korean VFX company Westworld). I’ve seen things most people wouldn’t — and didn’t — believe. That big house on fire in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” I watched digital claws poke out of Hugh Jackman’s knuckles in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” All those moments lost in time, like profits in studio accounting. But none have pulled me out the moment quite like the creature reveal in “Hope,” which doesn’t just serve up a spectacularly unimaginative monster, and doesn’t just make us watch it clip around the film’s Jeju Island set with all the credibility of a glitch in a computer game, but also has the tragic disadvantage of being introduced into one of the most sublime and muscular passages of any 21st century genre movie. The deflation is hard to overstate. It’s like if Dr. Alan Grant got to Jurassic Park and instead of a photorealistic Brachiosaurus he was greeted by Corey Stoll’s M.O.D.O.K. from “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”
“Hope” might have remained a worthwhile — compellingly vertiginous — experience if it managed to keep up its previous level of quality after the big reveal, but Na can only keep the momentum going for a few minutes before the rest of the movie starts to become as unimaginative as its monster.
I’m being deliberately vague about the nature of the monster, or the extent of the CGI character work that factors into the later parts of this story, but I will say that “Hope” leans harder into the visual effects as it goes along, even after a sluggish second act that slows the action down in favor of a (wonderfully gross) creature autopsy and some (needlessly drawn out) human detail. One-note characters like the poop-obsessed local ginseng hunter, the imbecilic yokel, and the puffed up mayor help to flesh out the film’s ensemble, but none of them are the least bit interesting on their own, and it’s only because Hwang and Jung bring so much energy to their roles that the central roles avoid the same fate. Poor Zo In-sung, playing the most charismatic of the village hunters, gets the worst of it; falling somewhere in the middle between a supporting part and a lead, he gets done dirty by this movie in a way that only starts to become amusing once you give up on “Hope” being anything more than a goof.
When the action does eventually pick up again (now in the wooded forests of Romania’s Retezek National Park), Na is powerless to get the genie back in the bottle. He still maintains his undeniable flair for arranging visceral bits of mayhem, which far outstrips the visual imagination on display in the average Hollywood blockbuster, but the effects have a way of reducing even the most inspired moments to the level of a very bad video game cutscene — and not only because one of the creature models is a dead ringer for the Licker from “Resident Evil 2,” and appears to have been copy-pasted straight out of 1998.
Of course, these later setpieces would never feel even half as tedious if the rest of the filmmaking were at all capable of propping them up, but Na — no stranger to stories about small-minded provincialism — completely biffs even the most basic elements of this barebones fable about reactionary violence and fear of the other. I’ll leave it to you to discover how Fassbender (along with Alicia Vikander, Cameron Britton, and Taylor Russell!) fit into the mix, but not even Na’s unbelievably shameless attempts to frame this movie as the first in a franchise can fully account for how little “Hope” shares about its more mysterious characters, let alone how little it makes us care about them. To say nothing about how ridiculous they look.
It’s clear that something went terribly wrong in the making of this movie, but the worst part about it is how much goes ecstatically right before the wheels fall off. Bad films are a dime a dozen, even at the world’s most prestigious festival — this one is only so painful because it first gives you the hope of being great. Abandon it, before it abandons you.
Grade: D+
“Hope” premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters.
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