The Current Cinema - Lots of violent confrontation in HOPE (Na Hong-jin, South Korea, 2026)

Na Hong-jin has made a mere four films in a decade and a half. Way less prolific than famous compatriots Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. All three are not making art house movies, at least not any longer. 

Na Hong-jin hit the ground running with his debut The Chaser. It arrived outside Korea on the back of phenomenal local box office. Three weeks after it opened it had grossed $US35m. Over 5 local million admissions were eventually recorded. It went to Cannes that year, played festival after festival, Warners bought remake rights and for a while Leonardo Di Caprio was mentioned. Lead actor Kim Yoon-seok even got a nomination in the Asia-Pacific Screen Awards.

Three years later Na had another Cannes entrant with The Yellow Sea. That one found an Australian distributor but limited exposure. It got some attention elsewhere. Michael Atkinson writing in The Village Voice noted: " Treating crime drama like a death cage tournament, this rousing, dark-hearted Korean epic doesn’t know quite when to stop once it begins, which is with an ethnically Korean Chinese cabbie (Ha Jung-woo) traveling to South Korea to find his errant wife and pay off her debt by killing a gangster. Nothing goes according to plan, of course, unleashing a cataract of whackings and wild chases..." (Which when you consider the story arc of Hope is not altogether wide of the mark for the director's modus operandi). Audiences rolled up to the extent of a box office that (only) went past $US15m, not that great for a film that cost $US9m.

It was another five years until Na's The Wailing was released in 2016 and despite that film's giant success it's been a decade until now when Na just took Hope to compete at Cannes and, on the back again of some hefty local box office, the film is getting some special attention including here in Australia where Madman has quickly put it into release after it played at MIFF as a Special Event. 

Still the film cost $US46 million so there must be something riding on its international success. The info on Wikipedia bodes well. "Upon its release in North America on September 9, 2026, the film grossed $1.1 million on its opening day, ranking second at the box office behind The Odyssey.  It went on to gross $3.2 million in its opening weekend in North America, before falling to $1.0 million in its second weekend. In North America, it is the third-highest grossing Korean film of all time."

All of that doesn't seem to have lead to any local critical coverage. The only links that come up when you Google the film lead to a piece in The Australian about lead female actor Jung Ho-yeon, or just Hoyeon as they call her in the paper, and a review in Filmink by Anthony O'Connor which is less than impressed and whose opening line is "… a nearly plotless, depth-avoiding machine that takes good ideas and bludgeons them to death with repetition, repetition, repetition." Why would you be an independent distributor. Still after two weekends on 73 screens it has taken a very respectable $699,279.

Ko Bum-seok, (Hwang Jun-min) the police chief of Hope Harbor
takes futile aim at one of the aliens

At 160 minutes it takes a long time. We see the devastation in the monster's wake from the start but it's a full fifty minutes  before we see the thing itself. It turns out to be very large, unnecessarily violent and very mean. It also turns out there are a lot of them about which is why and how the movie is basically able to separate two narrative strands that were momentarily joined at the start before the group of hunters, who find the first victim, a cow ripped to shreds, head off into the forest where monsters lurk everywhere. The cynical male cop (Hwang Jun-min) and his excitable female assistant (the afore mentioned Jung Ho-yeon) stick to the town and just deal with one of them. 

The monsters turn out to be aliens from space and not a million miles removed from Ridley Scott's creations though they spend most of the time in the open air and can run on all fours like the clappers when after their prey. A speeding cop car is no problem for them to overtake and mayhem, most notably the random destruction of property and motor vehicles, frequently ensues as they make their way. And they cant be killed despite bullets and grenades raining down on them...

There is one funny trope that occurs throughout. Something happens and someone says how did you know about that, where did you get that from, how could you tell. It's disarming because it beats the audience to the punch in asking the question. The question of course is never answered because the answer is that the script demands it.

I passed one of Sydney's legendary cinephiles in the foyer at the Ritz and asked if he'd seen it. I knew the answer. He seemed keen to tell me how derivative the whole thing was. Not so much if you dont go to many if any alien movies but are attracted by the thought of some high-powered Korean action. Which is where I came in...