Hope (2026) : The Most Expensive Disappointment in Korean Cinema History Begins Like a Masterpiece and Ends Like a Meme

Na Hong-jin makes films that feel like events. The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, The Wailing: three films that established him as one of the most viscerally exciting directors working anywhere in the world, a filmmaker with an almost supernatural ability to build dread from ordinary places and sustain it across punishing runtimes without once losing his grip on your nervous system. So when Hope was announced as his return after a decade away, reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made, I was not merely interested. I was ready to clear my calendar. The first forty minutes justify every bit of that anticipation. The remaining two hours are one of the most dispiriting experiences I have had in a cinema this year.

Let me start with what works, because it works so well that its eventual collapse feels genuinely tragic. The film opens in Hope Harbor, a coastal village close enough to the DMZ to be surrounded by landmines and plastered with posters warning residents to watch for spies. A dead cow appears in the road. Something enormous has been through the area. Police chief Bum-seok, played with tremendous gruff energy by Hwang Jung-min, sets out to investigate, and what follows is one of the most sustained and expertly choreographed action sequences I have seen in recent memory. Na stages the chaos one street at a time, each intersection revealing another desperate villager, another obliterated building, another sign of something massive and unseen moving through the town. The cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo, shooting in widescreen with a commitment to tactile, practical locations, gives the whole thing a physical authority that makes Hollywood's digital excess look genuinely embarrassing by comparison. For forty minutes, Hope is the film you hoped it would be, urgent and funny and escalating with the precision of a master.

The problem arrives when the creature does. Na spends the first act wisely concealing his monster in the Jaws tradition, showing only reactions, aftermath, and glimpses. When the reveal finally comes, the deflation is immediate and almost impossible to overstate. The CGI is not merely substandard for a film of this ambition and reported budget. It is genuinely difficult to watch without a creeping, uncomfortable laughter taking hold. The creature moves through the film's Jeju Island locations with the credibility of a video game asset from twenty years ago, and the decision to then spend the film's remaining two hours showing it in extensive, detailed close-up, including an actual on-screen dissection, suggests a filmmaker who either overestimated his effects team or lost the thread of what made his opening so effective. The contrast between the film's sublime first hour and its subsequent visual chaos is not just jarring. It is one of the stranger tonal collapses in recent genre cinema.

The structural problems compound from there. What follows the creature reveal is essentially the same action sequence repeated across different locations: chase, explosion, characters thrown into various objects, brief recovery, repeat. Na, who in The Wailing demonstrated an almost perverse patience with escalation and an extraordinary instinct for when to withhold and when to unleash, here seems unable to find an off switch. The film's middle section turns genuine tension into monotony through sheer repetition, and the characters, who were sketched efficiently enough in the first act, stop developing entirely once the action takes over. Jung Ho-yeon's Sung-ae arrives with real charisma and a running joke about her enthusiasm for heavy weapons that lands perfectly early on, only to be absorbed into the general chaos with no meaningful arc to complete.

The runtime is the film's other major structural failure. At nearly three hours, Hope would need exceptional narrative justification for every minute. It has exceptional justification for the first forty. The rest is a film that keeps promising to become something larger and more meaningful, gesturing at themes of community, identity, and institutional failure, without ever committing to them long enough to let them breathe. The monster-as-immigrant-metaphor reading that some have attempted is there in outline, but the film never develops it with the specificity or care that Bong Joon-ho brought to The Host, a comparison that keeps surfacing and keeps being unfavorable to Hope.

And then there is the ending, which I will not detail beyond saying that the audible collective laughter from audiences at Cannes and elsewhere was not accidental. The film closes on a note that announces itself as setup for a sequel with a confidence that the preceding two hours have not earned, and the reveal in those final minutes, involving Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in a context I genuinely cannot prepare you for, produces a reaction more appropriate to a midnight cult screening than to the most expensive Korean film in history. Whether this was intended as tonal provocation or represents a creative miscalculation of significant proportions, I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that the entire theater I watched it in erupted simultaneously, and not with the cathartic release of something earned.

Na Hong-jin had everything on his side: a decade of anticipation, a filmography that demanded attention, the largest budget ever given a Korean production, and a competition slot at Cannes. The tragedy of Hope is not that it fails entirely. The tragedy is that its failure is constructed on top of a genuinely extraordinary beginning that keeps reminding you, scene by repetitive scene, of the film it briefly was. Dull the first forty minutes down and you have a forgettable monster movie. Keep them and you have something that feels like a cruel demonstration of what could have been.

Hope is, in the end, a film that asks you to sit with its first hour and forgive everything that follows. I cannot. But I also cannot pretend that first hour does not exist, because it is some of the finest genre filmmaking of the year. Na Hong-jin still has it. Next time, he needs to trust it enough to cut the runtime in half, and spend whatever it takes to make the creature worthy of the film surrounding it.