Picture you’re at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Movie prestige incarnate. You’re excited to attend your latest in competition screening with other bourgeois French cinephiles. And you walk into see…a man on horseback frantically shooting at a CGI alien! The balls on Na Hong-jin, AND to have those people endure a 2 and a half hour epic? Suffice to say, this one should excite you if the director has that level of confidence.
The film opens with police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) getting shown a dead cow carcass by some local fisherman and townspeople in a small South Korean mountain/seaside town of mostly old people. With wildfires around them, resources are limited, worrying Bum-seok and rookie cop Sung-ae (Hoyeon) and their ability to serve and protect. They enlist the help of Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), a local leader and split up looking for what killed the cow in the city and in the woods. You’re gonna be gob smacked with who, or WHAT, the culprit is!
To a fault, Na Hong-jin luxuriates in Hope. He takes his time uneasing the audience by keep the aliens from our view, disturbing us with dead animals, or a weird sound, or a bang and then a hole in a building. As we get closer, Hong-jin’s restraint grows even more impressive: I can’t tell you how many times Bum-seok runs into people in the town who go ahead of him in a vehicle, only for that vehicle to come flying back towards the chief, now empty or creating a blood explosion. Or when Sung-ki wanders through the forest and finds more and more weird items as he gets deeper up the mountains. Both the town and the forest are incredible sets, especially the small town, and all the side passages and eerie abandoned buildings. The director also wrote the movie too, and has a blast with the conventions of an alien invasion movie. First and foremost: humanity based competence. The chief is cool, but as the situation becomes more scary, Bum-seok shows why he never got promoted to a big city, tripping a lot or picking up shotgun shells and failing to load any of them. In fact, Hoyeon gets the big hero’s entrace and arguably is the most competent part of the film. There’s some incredible faux jump scares that lead to darkly hysterical jokes that help keep the aliens from dominating the screen. It’s definitely an action comedy, but both are so specific, Hope always keeps you on your toes, confident in where it’s taking its tale.
Even the bad CGI aliens are a part of Hope’s charm. That’s because all the practical action sequences the humans are performing in are excellent. There’s a couple chases in here that Michael Bay wishes he could conjure. Na Hong-jin is also smart enough to mix it up: be it a new location or character, the recipe of the action is a little different each time, making each sequence wholly its own thing, and fortunately, rising to the occasion each time, much longer than you think its going to be. That sense of humor in the build up? Also there when the aliens enter the picture, just hitting other tropes. The old man monologue you know is coming is wonderfully deranged and dead serious at the same time. And the running gag of how much ammunition continues to show up in these battles is never not funny. Na Hong-jin has a bold swing for the final 15 minutes; for me, it kind of works, but ultimately is a bit of a letdown.
Unless, Hope 2 rules? There’s still enough there that a sequel would frankly be welcomed. Personally, I hope Na Hong-jin doubles down and Michael Bay’s this b*tch again at Cannes. In competition, just to eff with everyone. Thanks for a helluva ride, and many a chuckle!