‘Hope’ movie review: One Shibal After Another

I watched The Wailing during lockdown, and Na Hong-jin’s 2016 nightmare has spent the years since burrowing into my brain. The more I think about it, the more firmly it has lodged itself among my favourite Korean films of all time, but also the most thoroughly nerve-shredding horror films I have ever had the (dis)pleasure of watching. Naturally, I’ve spent the better part of a decade wondering what the hell Na could possibly follow it with, especially after ten years to brood over his next move. While his latest Cannes-premiering Hope hasn’t displaced its predecessor in my affections, it makes for a fascinating departure from the kind of exhilaration that first made me a fan of his work.

Written, directed and co-produced by Na, Hope assembles Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender for an extraterrestrial invasion in a South Korean settlement. Having watched the film, I’ve decided it can be divided into three distinct acts: Shibal, Diarrhoea Interlude and More Shibal.

Hope Harbor is a sleepy South Korean village near the DMZ, where the elderly residents seem to have accumulated enough unregistered firearms to supply a small insurgency. Things begin with police chief Bum-seok and his cousin Sung-ki investigating a dead cow bearing enormous, inexplicable wounds. The hunters suspect a tiger that wandered down from the North, but when more livestock turn up dead and Bum-seok returns to find the town’s streets and buildings thoroughly demolished, they realise they have a much bigger problem.

From here, Na begins injecting pure nitroglycerin into our veins, and Hope turns into one hell of an extended chase sequence, with the poor Bum-seok perpetually arriving just late enough to witness another fresh disaster. A gaping hole in the real-estate office, mangled bodies strewn across narrow alleyways, and the occasional disembodied, bloodcurdling roar from just around the corner, followed by somebody getting flattened by a flying car or some other piece of debris, gradually reveal the scale of whatever has descended upon Hope Harbor. 

Na milks this opening stretch for all its worth, keeping the creature frustratingly out of sight while Bum-seok scrambles through the wreckage. What makes it so effective is how meticulously he keeps raising the stakes without letting Bum-seok, or us, get a proper handle on what is happening. Hong Kyung-pyo’s bright, widescreen cinematography gives the carnage perfect clarity, while the camera follows Bum-seok in fluid tracking shots that make every new discovery feel like another piece of a horrible little puzzle. The production design deserves just as much credit, with wrecked storefronts, splintered furniture, shattered glass and the remnants of ordinary domestic life lending the destruction a convincing physicality. 

It takes nearly an hour for Na to finally show us what’s been tearing Hope Harbor apart, and the reveal is enough to explain why he kept it offscreen for so long. Bum-seok’s horrified slo-mo shibal — one of roughly a thousand variations of the word he’s already screamed into the afternoon — feels like the only appropriate response to what emerges. This is a humanoid extraterrestrial, with sickly green flesh, rotting teeth and matted hair, that instantly reminded me of the ghastly subterranean nightmare from Zach Cregger’s Barbarian.

There’s something uniquely panic-inducing about being chased by an unstoppable creature that could tear you limb from limb and move at roughly ten times your speed, especially when you’re stuck in a public space with nowhere to hide and no chance of outrunning the bastard. A giant kaiju can be terrifying, but its sheer scale makes the threat feel almost abstract; a monster that’s roughly human-sized, however, is close enough to catch you, and that proximity makes all the difference between some detached fear and genuinely wondering whether you’d piss yourself in the same situation.

The creature design also brought Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan to mind almost immediately, and the ensuing chase is about as close as I ever want to come to experiencing what it must feel like to have a Titan bearing down on me. For the next few minutes, my breath was held as the thing pinballed off debris with ragdoll physics, yet kept gaining on Bum-seok regardless; this brand of delirious, anything-goes exhilaration took me back to prime Michael Bay’s Transformers run. Bum-seok eventually gets some much-needed backup from Sung-ae, Hoyeon’s trigger-happy rookie cop who seems considerably better equipped for an alien invasion than the entire Korean national security apparatus. It isn’t long before the pair manage to turn the tables by blowing off the creature’s leg with a grenade launcher before leading it into an absolutely bonkers car chase.

With the first creature apparently dealt with, Hope briefly catches its breath for the highlight: Diarrhoea Interlude. Having spent the previous hour dispatching an alien with enough firepower to make Ellen Ripley proud, the charming Sung-ae now has to sit through an elderly man’s excruciatingly detailed account of his battle with diarrhoea, with vivid descriptions of him sniffing the “warm dung trickling down his leg” and the desperate act of “plugging his own hole with his middle finger”. It’s astonishingly prolonged and incredibly funny, but beneath the scatological oversharing, Sung-ae learns the creature they’ve just killed was merely one of several lurking in the forest, which means Hope Harbor’s collective supply of shibals is about to take another catastrophic hit.

As the final act begins, the aforementioned cousin Sung-ki and his hunting buddies have their own problems after stumbling upon a massive crashed spaceship in the forest, before being promptly ambushed by more aliens — this time including Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender. What follows is essentially Predator by way of a woodland rodeo, with the hunters scrambling for their lives over some of the most arresting horseback action I’ve seen in ages. The problem is that Na keeps returning to the same well long after he’s squeezed most of the fun out of it, and watching these creatures absorb seemingly endless rounds of ammunition and grenades eventually starts to feel tiresome. There are only so many times you can watch somebody shoot, scream shibal and run away before it starts losing bite, even when the action itself remains this spectacularly staged.

Naturally, the forest ordeal eventually spills into yet another car chase, this time with Bum-seok, Sung-ki, Sung-ae, retired colonel Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee) and Yang-bae, a spectacularly idiotic carpenter played by Eum Moon-suk who happens to be largely responsible for the entire alien fiasco, scrambling to escape Fassbender’s particularly persistent extraterrestrial bodyguard.

The chase eventually reaches its conclusion with a Hereditary-esque payoff, before Hope abruptly veers into a confounding epilogue. I’ll leave the specifics alone because this is one bewildering turn best experienced firsthand, although if I’m being honest, I genuinely have no idea what Na expects us to make of it. Has this been Na’s Digger-style lampooning of the Hollywoodification of local film industries all along? It’s difficult to tell where the satire (?) ends, and Na’s own blockbuster ambitions begin. The much-discussed CGI is also undeniably clunky, to put it kindly, although it didn’t pull me out of the film nearly as often as I expected. Perhaps years of sitting through Indian blockbusters with supposedly hundreds-of-crores worth “cutting-edge” CGI have conditioned me to expect very little.

That said, I’m genuinely gobsmacked by how willing Hope is to throw all semblance of restraint out the window just to keep the thrill-machine going. Honestly, I suspect Na knows exactly what he’s doing. This is the filmmaker behind The Wailing, after all, and I find it hard to believe someone so meticulous about building tension doesn’t understand the kind of lunacy he’s unleashing here. When it gets going, there’s a real thrill in watching it commit so completely to the bit, and it’s what makes Hope such a singular cinematic experience.

Hope is currently running in theatres

Published – October 23, 2026 12:00 pm IST