“Hope” announces itself as an alien-invasion thriller, but its deepest charge lies elsewhere: in the collision between cosmic terror and the stubbornly local textures of a vanishing Korean rural world. Na has said that the film’s setting is deliberately unspecified, yet the images keep pulling the viewer back toward a recognisably Korean historical and geographical imagination. Minefields, billboards advertising a now-defunct North Korean spy-reporting hotline, and the analogue infrastructure of landlines all suggest a borderland suspended somewhere in the 1980s. The result is a film that may insist on abstraction, but becomes most compelling when a bygone rural sensibility is struck by an otherworldly force of sudden, sweeping violence.
Set in the remote coastal village of Hope Harbor, “Hope” begins when police chief Beom-seok is called to investigate a disturbing incident involving a mutilated animal on a rural road. What first appears to be an attack by a wild beast soon reveals itself as something far stranger, forcing Beom-seok, rookie officer Sung-ae, local tracker Sung-ki, and the villagers into a desperate fight for survival against a mysterious extraterrestrial threat. As panic spreads through the community, the village’s old social bonds, family ties, fears, and instincts for self-preservation are tested by a violence that feels both incomprehensible and unstoppable.
That tension between the universal and the specific gives “Hope” its strange force. On one level, it is a thriller about a community besieged by aliens, abruptly cut off from the outside world. The destruction of communication lines makes the absence of mobile phones not merely a period detail but a narrative device. Yet the film’s most persuasive world-building does not come from the extraterrestrial threat but from Na’s dense evocation of rural Korea — a world of kinship networks, local hierarchies and blunt humour.
Na captures a vanishing rural sensibility with unusual sharpness. When a witness to the aliens asks Sung-ae, (played by Jung Ho-yeon in her big screen debut), whose daughter she is, the question is not casual background detail. It expresses an entire social structure in which identity is relational and communal. Likewise, when Beom-seok (played by Hwang Jung-min) insists that he must save Sung-ki because the latter is his second cousin, it may sound comically circular, but it also becomes a plot engine. Na understands how such ties can produce both absurdity and courage.
The first 45 minutes are among the strongest passages Na has ever directed. Shot by Hong Kyung-pyo, they possess a precision and atmospheric command that place them not only among the finest action sequences in recent Korean cinema, but among the most impressive examples of genre filmmaking anywhere. The village, the roads, the interiors, the bodies, and the surrounding landscape are rendered with a tactile intensity. Operating through dread and implication, this early section understands that what is suggested is often more frightening than what is shown.
That is also why the later creature work proves so frustrating. The aliens often move with unintended stiffness, their digital surfaces standing apart from the physical world rather than embedding themselves within it. In a work otherwise so invested in tactile visual textures, this separation is especially damaging: the creatures are meant to rupture reality, but too often they rupture its material believability instead.
And yet Na does something more complicated and emotionally charged. The aliens are repeatedly shot, their bodies perforated, and still they press forward with obsessive force. At first, this persistence seems monstrous. Gradually, Na reveals it as deeply resonant.
This shift produces some of the film’s most resonant emotional turns. In the collision between monstrous otherness and ordinary emotional recognition, Na’s command of tone and characterisation is strong enough to make the viewer look past the weak CG and the aliens’ familiar, seen-it-before design. How far one is willing to do so, however, will likely vary from viewer to viewer.
The emotional shift sharpens as the story progresses. In the midst of an action sequence, Na begins to frame the attacking humans from the aliens’ point of view. The effect is subtle but decisive: the moral and visual alignment starts to tilt. Are the villagers really the victims they claim they are as they choose violence with the heedless excitement of sport?
This reversal reaches its strongest force in the scenes involving Sung-ki, played by Zo In-sung. As he attacks the aliens, the viewer becomes increasingly uncertain about where their allegiance should lie. That Na can unsettle our sympathies so thoroughly around a star persona as familiar and beloved as Zo’s speaks both to the actor’s willingness to distort his own screen image and to the director’s skill in shifting our emotional alignment.
The alien language also helps sustain this dimension. Developed with academic consultation, it has a persuasive internal credibility, while the performances by Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, and Cameron Britton convey a sense of emotional resonance. Even when the digital bodies are not fully convincing, the performances suggest a compelling inner world.
The tonal register, however, remains unstable. Na has always been drawn to grotesque humour and bodily degradation, but here the B-movie comedy often feels loose and predictable. Some jokes arrive with punchlines one can anticipate a beat too early. The toilet humour is especially extended. The intended mix of horror, shame and absurdity is clear, but the execution is not always sharp enough.
At 160 minutes, “Hope” is undeniably overlong. Its scale — reportedly South Korea’s most expensive film to date — and ambition allow for a certain expansiveness, but its length becomes harder to justify when many of its weaker comic beats and predictable lines appear to have survived the edit. The problem is not simply duration, but rhythm. “Hope” contains passages of extraordinary control, especially in its first 45 minutes and in several action set pieces, yet it also allows scenes to sprawl beyond their dramatic usefulness.
More troubling is the reliance on animal suffering as atmosphere. “Hope” is filled with dead, distressed, or endangered animals — carcasses, skinned remains, chickens scattering before speeding cars, fish struggling on the ground, and lengthy horseback sequences — while the stray-cat explanation for an accident suggests that this disregard for animal vulnerability is built into the plotting itself. This may be meant to deepen the film’s vision of rural brutality and ecological disorder, but the effect is not merely symbolic. At a time when much of the global industry has become far more attentive to animal welfare, “Hope” feels unsettlingly out of step. Given past criticism of animal treatment on Korean sets, its end-credit assurance does little to neutralise the discomfort. The animals suffer so repeatedly that viewers may find themselves worrying less about the horror of the story than about the ethics of its making.
For all its flaws, “Hope” remains a work of formidable imagination. Its weaknesses stand out more sharply because this is Na Hong-jin, one of Korean cinema’s modern masters, and because it so often reaches for greatness. Yet even when its digital execution falters, its storytelling produces one of the most unusual emotional experiences in recent alien-invasion cinema. That effect owes much to Na’s direction, but also to the actors, who give emotional weight to material that feels subpar. In the end, it is most affecting not when it showcases Na’s instinct for fear, pity, and grotesque tenderness. Its imagination is stronger than its surfaces, making “Hope” impossible to dismiss.
