‘Hope’ Cannes Review: Korea’s Costliest Blockbuster Is a Breathless but Unfinished Beast

The intensity is unmatched. The logic, not so much. But fans of Asian action cinema will lose their minds watching Hope, the new film from the director of The Yellow Sea — a movie that careens from action to horror to science fiction, seemingly intent on launching what will almost certainly become a new genre franchise.

It’s an odd choice for Competition. Not because it’s an action film — there’s actually something refreshing about loosening up the definition of what belongs at a festival — but because it’s a film without an ending, one that barely cracks open the door to a universe that feels far, far larger than what we’re shown. A Midnight Screening or an Out of Competition slot might have suited it better, as was the case with The Wailing, Na’s previous film, which premiered here a decade ago.

On its own terms, the film works beautifully for its first hour: a story of relentless action and bruising intensity, following Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), a cop in Hope Harbor, a small South Korean town near the North Korean border, and the ragtag group of men and women who help him track down whatever creature has been tearing animals apart like paper. For the better part of that first hour, Na Hong-jin refuses to show us what’s causing the havoc — instead we follow the wreckage left in its wake, the sounds it makes, the explosions, the hell it leaves behind.

Our intrepid — and occasionally dim-witted — pursuers (this is a Korean film, and that means a handful of obligatory broad physical comedy beats) eventually come face to face with the source of the destruction: a massive, extraordinarily fast creature that looks like something between a greyhound, a big cat, and a reptile. Killing it won’t be easy, since it seems resistant to just about everything they throw at it. But the worse revelation is that killing it doesn’t end anything — it only marks the beginning. Because the same things, or worse, are happening all around them.

By the second hour, it’s clear what the director of The Chaser has in mind: channeling all that mystery and fury toward something approaching science fiction. The screenplay begins to show its cracks, but the physical intensity never lets up. With the help of cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo — whose credits include Parasite and Burning — Na stages a relentless chase through forests, highways, and open terrain, with a kinetic, full-body camera style to match. Among the group around Bum-seok, Hoyeon (Squid Game) stands out as a cop with a serious grudge against the creatures.

In purely kinetic terms, Hope delivers. There’s something video-game-ish about it, and the digital effects used to render the creatures aren’t quite as convincing as they could be — but it’s hard to deny that Na has the skill, the vision, and the budget (reportedly the most expensive Korean film ever made) to grab you by the collar and make you feel every chase in your bones. For viewers who find that enough, Hope will be a great film. For the rest of us, it leaves a lingering feeling — that it could have been, but was ultimately held back by a screenplay that doesn’t quite rise to the level of its own cinematic force.