Inside the Sheer Bravado of ‘Hope’

Sometimes when a film ends, you mosey out of the theatre, into the street and instantly forget about it. Other times, you remain in your seat, flattened into immobility by what you’ve just witnessed.

Hope is one of those latter types of experiences.

I had some knowledge of what to expect. Na Hong-jin’s last film The Wailing, released 10 years ago, was a serious mess-with-your-mind outing that combined Korean history, Christian theology and good old-fashioned scariness into a creation of dizzying complexity. The layers of narrative begged for repeated viewings, if only to get to the bottom of things.

Turns out the bottom of things is a pretty dark place. And that’s where the director Na Hong-jin does his best work.

At the press screening for Hope, the public relations team asked for first impressions of the film, and I wasn’t able to provide anything. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now, and I’m still not much closer to forming a coherent interpretation.

But let’s begin at the beginning and unpack a little.

In a tiny little hamlet called Hope Harbour located close to the North Korean border, the chief of police Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) along with his cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) have been sent on a rather unusual call.

The body of a bull, ripped and shredded into a gory heap, is lying in the middle of a road. The dead animal has attracted the attention of a local band of hunters who offer unhelpful opinions on what could have possibly killed the massive bovine.

A tiger, down from the Demilitarized Zone, seems the only logical explanation. After the assembled group bandies some insults and scratches their collective heads, police chief Ko Bum-seok heads back into town to warn the locals. The hunters, meanwhile, take off for the nearby woods to see if they can capture and kill the murderous tiger.

Upon returning to the village, the cop finds the place has been reduced to matchsticks, and the townsfolk are little more than crimson splatters. Whatever has taken its wrath out on the town and its inhabitants is considerably larger and more pissed off than any earthly animal.

In his high-heeled Beatle boots and leather jacket, the police chief cuts a curious figure as he makes his way past the piles of dead bodies and destroyed buildings. The sound of his boot heels cuts through the eerie stillness, adding a strangely jaunty beat to the proceedings.

The fact that he is obviously terrified out his mind is strangely undercut by a gonzo humour endemic to Korean cinema.

I didn’t know whether to scream or giggle, but both work.

Meanwhile, the group of hunters led by Ko Sung-ki have stumbled across more slaughtered cows and a missing farmer. Well, at least part of him is missing: his severed arm is hanging from a tree.

As the men move deeper into the woods, they discover a campsite that is strangely empty save for a few bored-looking horses. Whatever has been there has no beef with the equines, but it has buried a full-grown bear up to its snout in the forest.

At this point, you may well be sharing the feelings of chief Bum-seok as he searches the ruins of Hope Harbour, looking in vain for answers and finding only complete destruction.

It is worth pausing for a moment to take a deep breath and attempt to ascertain what the Sam Hill is happening in this film.

Is this a simple monster movie, an allegory for the relationship between North and South Korea, an exercise in cartoon ultra-violence, or something a bit stranger?

For conclusive answers, you’ll need to watch Hope in its entirety. And the bad news is that even that isn’t enough.

Repeat viewings may actually yield more questions than answers, and that’s an interesting thing.

An invitation to let things be weird

Hope is the most expensive film ever made in South Korea. At its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this spring, the movie divided critics into a few different camps. While some folks sniffed about genre film being a little on the lowbrow side, other viewers were entranced by Hope’s sheer bravado and scale.

I can see both sides, but there is something else.

Not to be spoiler-y, but midway through, a shift happens, and one’s sympathies head off in a direction that I never saw coming.

Bum-seok comes across a lone survivor who has taken refuge under a bridge. The two men team up, but neither is up to the task of tracking down whatever has turned their town into an open-air abattoir. In their bungling efforts, they manage to shoot an innocent man and attract the attention of the rampaging monster.

The remaining townsfolk aren’t entirely passive victims, however, leading to one of the film’s ongoing jokes about the boggling numbers of unregistered firearms in the tiny town. The villagers, whose median age is about 106, are waging all-out war against the intruder, piling into the back of a truck and speeding down the narrow streets, guns, many guns, a’blazing.

The rookie on the town police force, Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) is one of the few humans who engenders some sympathy as she variously rescues her boss, treats the injured and tries her best to understand what is happening. As she shoulders major weaponry and drives her cop car like Evil Knievel on methamphetamines, she cuts a striking figure. This helps as well.

But for the most part, the residents of Hope Harbour aren’t the heroes one might wish for. In fact, incompetence is the least of their sins.

A certain level of grotesquery and overall ick about humanity is alluded to in many ways, but the scene that gave me the most pause is a relatively mundane sequence where the hunters take a snack break in the woods. As they eat and drink, the film plays close and peculiar attention to the squelchy sounds of mastication. In a word, it’s gross. But also why?

This bodily reality comes up again in another, latter sequence, where an elderly man recounts an initial sighting of the creatures. An extended, rather gratuitous account of the old dude’s battle with diarrhea in the face of this encounter made me wonder what the filmmaker is attempting to do.

That’s the part I am still trying to figure out.

Things get stranger still when the extraterrestrial origins of the monstrous creatures are revealed with the discovery of a downed spaceship. The aliens (played by Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender) are as graceful and ethereal as the humans are sweaty, dirty and deranged.

As the rest of the action unspools in a series of Looney Tunes-style chase sequences, the bad decisions, greed and inhumanity of humanity keep adding up.

Meanwhile, the so-called monsters are gaining in sympathy, depicted in states of awful grief, parental protectiveness and righteous vengeance.

Just as you’re trying to figure out who to root for, the film ends on the biggest cliffhanger possible accompanied by a Biblical quote drawn from Hebrews 11:1 that states: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

WHAT!?

In an interview with critic Zachary Lee, questions about the film’s ultimate intent were posed to director Na Hong-jin, but even his answers weren’t much help in parsing matters.

“I tried to reflect on the true meaning of the title, how the movie should feel, how the conclusion should feel for the audience, and what the message should really be. After considering that, I thought it best to include a direct mention of Hebrews,” Hong-jin told Lee. “I can’t help but keep coming back to these Biblical passages to bookend my films.”

I am no theologian, but the quote from Hebrews seems to indicate that a new covenant is necessary to cleanse people of their sins and allow them to evolve.

Strangely enough, theological questions, alien visitors and the end of the world have been something of a theme in movies this year. The idea also surfaced in Steven Spielberg’s film Disclosure Day.

In Spielberg’s film, the arrival of alien visitors was treated as a new way of understanding and opening oneself to the wonders of the universe.

In Hope, the arrival of interstellar entities lands differently, with the epic crash of a spaceship, the murder of an innocent, and the overall terribleness of most of humanity.

Is redemption even possible or is utter annihilation the only outcome?

All of it made me think about what might really happen when first contact takes place. In all statistical likelihood, we’re not alone in the universe, and as BBC science writer Ian Taylor makes clear in a September 2026 Science Focus article, we’re really not ready to face this reality.

Even as one ponders the question about other lifeforms, one of the most fascinating stories in science is taking place right over our heads with the arrival of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

While consensus on the true nature of the object remains divided, there is no denying that something curious is afoot.

What the human response might be to the fact we’re not the be-all and end-all of the cosmos, and the apotheosis of God’s plan, remains to be seen.

Perhaps the sequel to Hope might offer some answers. But I remain a Doubting Thomas about that.

‘Hope’ is now playing in major theatres.