Cannes Review: Na Hong-Jin’s Hope Is a High-Octane Creature Feature That Falls Flat

It’s never night in Hope Harbor. At least so long as we’re there. The eschatological events of writer-director Na Hong-Jin’s high-octane, highly anticipated Hope unfold over the course of one long, grueling, nonstop chase of a day for its rag-tag team of small-town South Korean cops, yokels, and hicks, an ensemble that ranges from heroic to hilarious in this blathering creature-feature phantasm.

Police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is a hard-headed, short-tempered dimwit who thinks himself a prominent, powerful figure in his rural district, if not the smartest man alive, a disposition that makes every word out of his mouth condescending. Much like Joaquin Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe Cross, Bum-seok thinks he knows better than everyone, but the joke is on him. When a group of farmers alert him to the mysterious death of a cow that was slashed all over but left uneaten, he speeds into an investigation that immediately becomes an inverted hunt. Bum-seok is suddenly the prey to an unknown, unseen predator that’s torn every square inch of Hope Harbor apart. 

It takes a tension-packed 45 minutes for Na to reveal the giant alien-demon responsible, an unveiling that begins with intrigue and quickly sours into willful ignorance for anyone who wants to enjoy the experience without focusing too much on the shoddy CG craftsmanship of the monster in motion. It takes the same amount of time for Bum-seok’s fellow officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon)—whose entrance made the audience go wild in true blockbuster-fandom form–to save the day. But that doesn’t last for long. As it turns out, the first monster is only one of many, and as more people flock to the duo of cops to help, Hope begins losing footing in overlong sequences, CGI screwery, and a flimsy screenplay fit for Kevin Feige. 

The easiest way to describe Hope, while leaving the lion’s share of its monster mysteries intact, is: Eddington meets Spielberg’s War of the Worlds meets Attack on Titan. The irony of those obvious and worthy influences is the fact that they contain what Hope can’t muster. Na’s passion project matches some of Ari Aster’s small-town comedy. Consider a sequence in which a local ginseng hunter unleashes an absurd amount of detail about the shit he was taking when he first spotted one of the monsters in the woods. Yet it can’t lift a finger to Eddington‘s depth of character, narrative complexity, or dense package of ideas across political and thematic spectrums. 

Like War of the Worlds, Hope bears impressive set pieces and hot-pursuit sequences. But there’s narrative weight in Spielberg’s invasion opus, like there was in the 1953 original—a heaviness that builds stakes in which an audience can invest and ultimately lose themselves. Hope is hopeless in such regard. Trace explorations of xenophobia peek out from behind the curtain in Na’s attempt to humanize the aliens with a sense of soul and tragic drama. Wiry-thin displays of symbolism lack the spirituality and thematic sophistication of his previous work, especially The Wailing.

What Hope does have, however, is an approach to cinematography that radiates creativity and consideration, capturing production design that will leave your jaw on the floor. With the former, DP Hong Kyung-pyo sets up gorgeous wide shots aplenty across Jeju Island’s mountainous island-village landscape. The cinematographer behind The Wailing, Burning, and Parasite finds seemingly infinite ways to reimagine the ongoing chase in gripping, lighting-paced camera work, and captures the rich, mossy greens and tall, looming trees of Romania’s Retezek National Park with astonishing artistry. To envision the village, production designer Lee Hwokyoung took on a massive project in creating monster-sized holes that run through the entirety of obliterated buildings, streets littered with the debris of disaster at an extraordinary, Hollywood-level scale. 

The alien creatures (played by Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton) were meticulously motion-captured into their gargantuan extraterrestrial performances, faces mapped onto hulking creatures whose expressions and semi-imaginative designs are fully hampered by the rudimentary CGI, rendering sentimental moments comical and action-packed potential idle. It’s a terrifically damning example of what happens when a production doesn’t provide its visual effects team(s) with enough time, money, or personnel.

As the new titleholder of South Korea’s most-expensive film, Hope teases the promise of a fresh international arthouse approach to a long-stale subgenre in the sci-fi blockbuster. While it might offer more than a Marvel movie in cinematic craft, it suggests little more in story, character, and depth. What begins as a riveting romp through monster mystery ultimately falls flat as a fun, middling creature feature that’s a whole hour too long.

Hope premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released this fall by NEON.