Hope review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 09.13.26
★★★½ 3.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Na Hong-jin channels the dread of The Wailing into a full-bore creature feature, staging a small-town unraveling with monsters you hide from, not outrun—and that distinction makes the film genuinely scary. It looks terrific, the performances land, and the slow-burn mystery lets you share the town’s bafflement rather than endure an exposition dump. The tension is thick, the atmosphere sticks, and the creature work satisfies. The film eventually takes a direction I don’t think it needed, costing it some momentum without breaking it. Still, the craft and scares are strong enough that I’m going back for a second watch.
Full review — contains spoilers
This is another solid Korean genre movie that reminds me how consistently good South Korean filmmakers have gotten at this. Na Hong-jin, who made The Wailing, is doing science fiction and creature horror this time. We're in a small South Korean town where a series of increasingly strange and violent incidents starts happening. People are getting killed, animals are being harmed, property is being destroyed, and nobody can work out what the hell is going on. Eventually it becomes clear we're dealing with something that looks a lot like an alien incursion, and that's all I'm giving you, because the movie is much more fun if you don't know what these people are dealing with or where Na is taking it. The posters already put you in alien territory, so I don't think saying that much spoils anything.
We've gotten so many good Korean zombie movies that there's practically a subgenre built around them at this point, but Hope takes that same horror energy somewhere else. This is a monster movie, and the monsters are genuinely scary. I've talked before about fast zombies and slow zombies, and I think monsters split the same way. There are monsters you can run from and monsters where running isn't going to do you any damn good, so you'd better find somewhere to hide. These are the hide-from kind, which is much scarier to me, because once a thing is so physically overwhelming that fighting it was never an option, the whole dynamic of the movie changes.
It looks great, the acting is good, and for most of the runtime I thought this was excellent. The mystery builds slowly enough that you get to sit in the confusion along with the town instead of catching an exposition dump about what has arrived and what it wants.
Where Hope may lose people is toward the end. Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender become important to how all of this wraps up, and once the movie gets into that material it heads in a direction I'm not sure it needed to go. I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to ruin it. You'll get there and form your own opinion about whether that turn was necessary or whether it costs the movie something it had already earned. For me it went sideways, though not nearly enough to undo everything before it. The monsters work, the atmosphere works, and there are long stretches here that are exactly the kind of horror I want to see.
I liked it enough that I'm going back to see it again.