Hope

Na Hong-jin's first film since The Wailing, finally. It's a Korean sci-fi monster movie set in Hope Harbor, a sleepy village pressed up against the Demilitarized Zone, where the local police chief (Hwang Jung-min) starts fielding reports of a tiger prowling the woods. The tiger isn't the problem. Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander turn up as extraterrestrial beings, with Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton rounding out a cast nobody expected to see in the same frame. Neon's distributing stateside after a Cannes 2026 premiere that split the room clean down the middle.

Na is one of the three or four best genre directors working anywhere, and Hope has the texture to prove it. The Wailing's dread is here. So is The Chaser's clenched, panicked momentum. Hwang Jung-min, maybe Korea's best working character actor, grounds the thing with a weary small-town cop who feels pulled from a Bong Joon-ho script. Fassbender and Vikander, cast against type as something not-quite-human, play weird without camping it up. The village itself is a real set piece. Na shoots the DMZ fog and the forest like something is always about to walk out of it, which, well.

It is 160 minutes long and the version that premiered at Cannes had unfinished VFX, which several critics savaged. IndieWire compared the CGI unfavorably to The Mummy Returns, which is a thing you can do to a Palme contender if you want. Awardswatch gave it a C- and called it the first act of a trilogy that forgot to end. Na has already said he's written a sequel, so if you were hoping for a self-contained story that resolves, calibrate. The human drama thins out in the back half while the monster business takes over, and the tonal shifts between dread and schlock aren't always controlled.

If The Wailing and Train to Busan and Memories of Murder are your top-shelf, you're already in. Fans of Bong, Park Chan-wook, and the sweaty, long-runtime Korean thriller tradition will eat this. If your tolerance for monster-movie CGI is low, or you need every subplot to pay off inside one film, you'll be checking your phone by hour two. It is not Arrival. It's not even trying to be. It's a maximalist swing-for-the-fences creature feature from a director who doesn't know how to make a small movie.

Worth It, with an asterisk for runtime and the VFX gripes. The craft case holds: Na's direction is specific and strange, Hwang anchors it, the atmosphere is doing real work, and the Fassbender-Vikander casting pays off as a genuine curiosity rather than stunt casting. The messaging never takes the wheel. Whatever Na's saying about borders, hope, and the people who get crushed between powers, he's saying it through dread and bodies in a forest, not through speeches. The flaws are craft flaws, not sermon flaws. That's the show you want to sit with for 160 minutes, even when it wobbles.