In a Year of Great Horror Movies, This One’s Opening May Be the Most Thrilling of All

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Ko Bum-seok, the local police chief of Hope Harbor, a small South Korean village near Korea’s Demilitarized Zone, stands over a massive dead cow, cursing. The cow—which has been mauled but, interestingly, not eaten, by an unknown large creature—lies in the middle of a road, blocking traffic. Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is made aware of the carcass by his cousin, Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), a member of a local group of hunters. The boys lie to Bum-seok that the cow was killed by a tiger, and it doesn’t take much for him to believe them. As nearby wildfires have isolated the village from communications with the outside world, Bum-seok asks his cousin’s group to follow the beast’s trail and catch it, while he heads into town to investigate the matter further. What he finds is a community in the throes of devastation: Storefronts are demolished, cars are toppled, and the town is empty except for the occasional band of men, heavily armed, yelling and riding around on trucks attempting to shoot at something Bum-seok can’t see. The wildfires have diverted all available police backup, rendering Bum-seok the town’s loan defender, at least in theory. It’s been mere minutes, but we’ve been injected into what feels like a scene from a war film after the battle is over—except Hope Harbor’s battle has only begun, and the town is losing.

This is how Hope , the new sci-fi action-thriller from South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin, begins. Coming on the heels of his last feature-length film—the 2016 horror flick The Wailing , which achieved universal critical acclaim and is generally considered a masterpiece—Na is back after a decade with what is arguably Korea’s most high-profile release yet. Hope , a two-and-a-half hour romp, is reportedly the most expensive Korean feature film ever produced, with a budget of approximately $46 million (KRW70 billion ), and is said to be opening on 1,500 screens (including in special formats, like 4DX ), making it the widest Korean film release since Parasite . The fanfare makes sense given the picture’s larger-than-life exploration of a hokey small-town police chief, Bum-seok, who must team up with his gung-ho rookie deputy, Im Sung-ae ( Squid Game ’s Jung Ho-yeon), to protect their small town of mostly elderly inhabitants from a mysterious monster. The cast involves a mix of veteran Korean actors, like Hwang and Im Hyun-sik, alongside well-known Western actors, such as Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton. And yet for all that star power, reviews for Hope remain mixed at best, with a score of 67 on the review aggregator Metacritic.

I can understand why many critics would take a middle-of-the-road stance with this movie, which attempts to mix elevated comedic writing with a hilariously silly use of visual effects, not always successfully. But this is actually what makes Hope so special and, above all else, deeply entertaining.

The opening set piece to Hope —an hour-long scene of Bum-seok going through a demolished Hope Harbor in pursuit of the monster—is fantastic.