Na Hong-jin’s ‘Hope’ Wows Cannes With Aliens vs. Korea

Ten years is a long time to wait for a movie. But Na Hong-jin — the South Korean director behind The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, and the genuinely haunting The Wailing — has always operated on his own schedule, and Hope, his long-awaited return, makes the case that some things are worth the patience. The film premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, and it arrived not with a whisper but with the force of a car being hurled through a brick wall by something that is very much not a tiger.

What Na has made is a sci-fi creature feature set in the sleepy coastal town of Hope Harbor, a shabby South Korean hamlet so close to the DMZ that its weathered billboards warn residents to “Report Spies!” and “Guard Against Infiltrators!” — a sight gag that lands with extra punch once you understand what’s actually coming. The setting is the late ’80s, pre-cellphones, and the film opens with police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, reuniting with Na after The Wailing) being called out to investigate the mutilated carcass of a bull in the middle of a field. Massive claw marks. Reeks of old fish. Local hunters suggest it might be a legendary tiger that wanders down from the North every so often, having learned to navigate the landmines. Bum-seok doesn’t buy it.

He’s right not to.

What follows in the film’s first 45 minutes is, by near-universal critical agreement, one of the most exhilarating extended sequences in recent action cinema. Na keeps the creature entirely out of frame — you see only its effects: obliterated storefronts, rows of splintered houses, corpses strewn across narrow alleyways, cars launching out of nowhere. The monster is everywhere and nowhere, and the tension is almost unbearable. When Bum-seok frantically sprints through street after devastated street, the film works like a masterclass in restraint — every explosion off in the distance, every vehicle hurled from out of frame making the unseen threat feel that much more enormous.

Enter Hoyeon — and She Owns the Movie

The moment the chaos truly ignites is when Officer Sung-ae arrives. Played by Hoyeon — the model-turned-actress who became a global phenomenon on Squid Game — she pulls up in a squad car packed with military-grade weapons and immediately takes charge. “It’s killed so many people,” she bellows, executing a perfect handbrake turn. “Monster or not, it’s just not right!” Rather than scared, she’s furious. And she is absolutely magnetic.

Sung-ae is foul-mouthed, fearless behind the wheel, and handles rocket blasters the way most cops handle a clipboard. Hoyeon delivers her lines — “You crossed the line!” “Don’t push your luck, you stinking butthole!” “Die already, motherfucker!” — with such controlled comic timing and physical presence that multiple critics are already calling her arrival one of the year’s great star-making moments. The Wrap compared her to Choi Min-sik and Lee Byung-hun. The Hollywood Reporter called her “a hoot in her first feature role.” At one point, when hunter Sung-ki (Zo In-Sung) pulls off a spectacular shot from a speeding car window, Sung-ae’s reaction is simply: “What are you, a movie star? So damn hot!” — a line that lands even funnier given that Hoyeon is the one saying it.

The humor throughout is one of Hope‘s secret weapons. Na’s comedy is always judicious — never too broad, never breaking the tension so much as releasing it just enough. There’s the extended, deeply bawdy monologue from a hospitalized senior who describes, in painstaking detail, the spicy-pork-induced digestive emergency he suffered at the exact moment four monsters appeared on the mountainside — “I swear in all my 70 years I never clenched my hole so tight” — while Hoyeon’s reactions are priceless. There’s a darkly hilarious necropsy sequence in which a scientist, after every blade and saw proves inadequate to cut through the creature’s skin, suits up in protective plastic-wear and fires up a chainsaw. And then there’s the tragic-comic moment when Bum-seok and an elderly man with a bow and arrow open fire on what they think is the monster through a closed door — only to discover it was the local butcher on a phone call. “Honey, I’ll call you back,” the man says into the receiver, glancing down at his likely mortal shotgun wounds. “Feels breezy.”

The Aliens, the Stars, and the Big Reveal

The creatures themselves — invaders from the planet Gh’ertu, crash-landed in Hope Harbor — are where critics start to diverge. The first monster reveal, around the 45-minute mark, arrives as a clawed hand reaching out of a darkened tunnel to grab a man by the head and fling him like a rag doll. The full look comes shortly after, and reactions ranged from impressed to genuinely deflated depending on who you ask.

Hollywood Reporter called the creature designs “strikingly original” and praised the effects work even while acknowledging occasional obvious CG touches. The Wrap noted that while the visual effects can leave the creatures feeling “occasionally more awkwardly weightless,” the film’s craft carries it through. Variety was more pointed, calling the aesthetic “weightless” and reminiscent of “old-school videogame” design. And IndieWire went hardest, comparing the reveal unfavorably to the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns — a sting that will land with anyone who remembers that particular CGI catastrophe — and arguing that the deflation from the film’s extraordinary first hour is “hard to overstate.”

What nearly everyone agrees on is that the film’s secret weapon in its later sections isn’t the effects — it’s who’s inside them. Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton all appear via motion capture as members of the Gh’ertu alien clan, with Fassbender, Vikander, and Russell playing what Deadline describes as the royal family of their planet. They speak a constructed alien language and carry themselves with an otherworldly calm that, in the film’s more thoughtful moments, makes them seem considerably more civilized than the panicked humans trying to destroy them. It adds a quiet layer of commentary — the aliens as immigrants, feared and attacked before anyone thinks to ask whether they’re actually the enemy — though Variety noted that reading requires “pulling a muscle” to get there, and it’s a stretch. The casting of Western stars as the heavily CG-disguised alien clan could also be read as a sly inversion of the way Hollywood has historically othered Asian actors in its own blockbusters.

Na himself has spoken of the film’s thematic undercurrent — the way the villagers’ instinct is to destroy first, understand never — though Hope wears its politics lightly. This is, above all, a chase movie. And what a chase.

The Action, the Craft, and That Highway Sequence

Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who shot Parasite, Burning, and The Wailing, delivers work here that multiple reviewers called a marvel. His camera doesn’t shake and jitter through the chaos — it glides, sweeps, and tracks with an almost insolent grace, making the carnage feel both enormous and precisely controlled. There’s one shot in particular — a speeding car pulling a U-turn while the camera swings around and follows it receding into the distance, as if the camera itself had built up so much momentum it needs a runway’s length to change direction — that reviewers singled out as a pure expression of cinematic craft applied to gleefully pulpy material.

The score by Michael Abels — who worked with Jordan Peele on Get Out and Nope — is being called an all-timer, unsettling and dread-soaked early on before becoming frenetically nerve-shredding as the stakes escalate. Editor Kim Sunmin keeps the 160-minute runtime from feeling indulgent, folding dialogue scenes and action sequences into a package that, for most of its runtime, never loosens its grip.

The film’s climax — a sprawling, chaotic chase down a deserted mountain highway involving cars, a horse, at least one alien who could outrun a marathon champion, and Zo In-Sung’s hunter Sung-ki riding bareback alongside a speeding vehicle — is the sequence critics keep returning to. Deadline called it “spectacular.” The Wrap put it in conversation with Mad Max: Fury Road. Even IndieWire, the film’s harshest reviewer, conceded that Na’s “undeniable flair for arranging visceral bits of mayhem far outstrips the visual imagination on display in the average Hollywood blockbuster.”

The whole production — reportedly the largest budget in Korean film history, rumored at around ₩50 billion (approximately $33 million USD) — was shot on real locations, including the Jeju Island set pieces, with the film later moving to Romania’s Retezek National Park for the forest sequences. The practical grounding of the filmmaking is part of what makes the CGI creatures feel jarring to some viewers: when everything around them is so tactile, so real, the weightlessness of the digital figures stands out.

A Cannes Competition Curveball — and What Comes Next

The fact that Hope landed in Cannes Competition at all is its own kind of story. This year’s festival has skewed heavily toward quieter auteur cinema, and a two-hour-40-minute alien creature feature — however prestigious its director — is a genuinely unusual presence in the main competition. Variety noted that it “does not rationally fit” there. Deadline called it “a rare film of this kind to get that kind of instant cred from the festival.” Na has had films in Cannes before — The Wailing premiered here in 2016 — but this is his first time in the main competition, and he’s arrived with something that defies every expectation of what a Cannes Competition film is supposed to be.

NEON will release Hope in theaters. And yes — the ending sets up a sequel clearly enough that pretty much every critic mentioned it. Whether the franchise gets there will likely depend on how audiences respond to what Na has built here: a film that is, depending on your tolerance for janky CGI and a saggy middle act, either a breathtaking genre triumph or a brilliant first hour followed by a long, expensive stumble.

What’s not in dispute is Hoyeon. Whatever else you think of Hope, she arrived at Cannes as a Squid Game breakout and left as something else entirely. As one character says of her in the film, in a moment that now reads as almost prophetic: “What are you, a movie star?”