Hope: a big, bold South Korean creature feature

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

On the outskirts of a small South Korean town called Hope, a group of hunters come across the badly mauled corpse of a cow. The bovine victim is like the crab eaten arm in Jaws (1974), the first clue that something is out there, a monster endangering the community. Local police chief Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min) shows up to prod the carcass and mutter grumpily at the hunters for having unregistered firearms. The hunters in turn wind him up by claiming it might be a tiger. His cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-Sung) and friends are seconded to head into the woods to see if they can spot the beast that might have done such a thing.  

Heading back to town, Beom Seok comes across evidence of further mayhem. Monster-sized holes gape in the buildings and bodies are strewn around; soon explosions and gunfire are breaking out everywhere. Once he’s gathered his courage, Beom Seok begins following the crashing and booming sounds. He’s soon joined by officer Sung-ae (Jong Hoyeon, who most will recognise from Squid Games, 2021-2025) and who is accorded a hero-shot welcome. The town is located close to the Korean Demilitarized Zone and signs warn against infiltrators and spies. This might be why the elderly citizens are so well stocked with weaponry, much to the bafflement of the police chief – “Where did all these guns come from?” – as they hurtle through the streets in an improvised armoured car shooting machine guns and rocket launchers. 

The script is jammed with sharp, semi-parodic meta-commentary. When people suddenly become capable of heroic actions, other characters express wonder: “When did your cousin become so good at riding a horse?”. There’s a long apparently relevant monologue about an old man caught short in the forest that seems to go on as long as his bowel movement: it’s a literal exposition dump. One guy is recruited who is very obviously a serial killer in his spare time – a reference perhaps to Na Hong-jin’s debut film The Chaser (2008) – mannequins sit in baths filled with blood in his shed. Even the violence, which begins realistically, escalates into Tex Avery cartoon territory. Bodies are embedded in walls by the force with which they’ve been thrown and the townsfolk attempting to defend themselves have a disquieting knack of causing collateral damage, including shooting each other. Sung-ki turns out to be something of a hardcase, to the extent he has more lives than Tom and Jerry put together.   

The first hour of the film is essentially a chase scene of pure action cinema. Unrelenting, pounding and beautifully filmed by Parasite (2019) and Burning (2018) cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, the light of early morning slanting through car windows as the chase tears through different environments. The sheen of peak Steven Spielberg is blended with the dynamism of George Miller throughout the film.  

As the mystery is revealed, the scale of the film gets bigger and bigger, barmier and barmier, and the monsters themselves, performed via mo-cap by Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender, are revealed as a CGI creation of a convincingness that varies. Some larger plot is at hand, presumably setting up a sequel which Na Hong-jin has already written.   

Hope is a work that has taken years to bring to the screen and Na Hong-jin has – following his superb 2016 film The Wailing – taken a really big swing. The result is a full-on, unapologetic action movie packed with breathtaking and breathless car chases, horse chases, footchases and monster chases. It’s unlikely a movie with quite the same kill count or expended ammunition has ever played in competition at Cannes. In 2015, many believed that George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road deserved a competition spot and had been kept out only by the preconceived notion that “action cinema” was not suited to the festival.  

Hope is not quite at the level of Fury Road, from which it undoubtedly takes inspiration, but not many films are. Still, there is no reason this shouldn’t take its place among the crème de la crème. There is nary a moment of boredom and its numerous peaks of exhilarating action are often undercut by a laugh-out-loud payoff. Brilliantly crafted and beautifully shot, we can only hope this wild film gets the follow up it so richly deserves.