Machine Guns, Aliens, Horses, and High Speed U-Turns - The Movie: Hope (2026) Review

Director: Na Hong-jin

Notable Cast: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Lee Sang-hee, Um Mun-suk, Im Hyun-sik

 

For the start of this review, I want to note that Na Hong-jin, as a director and a writer, had already crafted three films that I would be very tempted to consider masterpieces. The Yellow Sea and The Chaser are incredibly grounded, gritty thrillers that blend action, drama, and horror nearly perfectly. The Wailing, his third film, is a masterpiece that sucker-punches its audience with suffocating folk-horror elements that bleed into dark comedy and some of the most thrilling slow-burn storytelling in genre cinema. 

 

Which is why, after seeing his latest ‘epic,’ Hope, I feel…dysregulated. 

 

Hope is Na Hong-jin drilling further into genre cinema with his swing at an action-spectacle flick. He once again weaves genres together in unconventional ways, and manages to craft a film that is, in the moment, absolutely thrilling to endure, with massive action set pieces, incredibly charming characters, and some of the most tense chases you will see in a film this year - if not this decade. Can’t say I wasn’t absolutely engaged through most of its 2.5+ hour runtime.

 

Yet, Hope is also perhaps the messiest and most baffling film I’ve seen this year. Moment to moment, I was glued to the screen, but its narrative and storytelling are wildly off-kilter at times, setting up expectations for characters, plot, or narrative, then either ignoring them or hammering them home with the power of 10 metric tons of nuclear alien fire. It makes choices that either make it the greatest dumb movie of all time or the dumbest great movie of all time. Depending on how you want to read Na Hong-jin’s intentions, I suppose. 

 

Wailing, The (2016)

Director: Na Hong-jin

Notable Cast: Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Jun Kunimura, Chun Woo-hee, Jo Han-chul, Jang So-yeon

At this point, I feel like Na Hong-jin is just fuckin’ with us. There is no way that a director takes his first three feature length films and drops three instant classics. Not just cult classics, but true cinematic classics that rise above their assigned genres and edgy non-mainstream elements. His latest film, the horror thriller The Wailing, is just one more film to add to his already impressive cinematic streak of glory. While The Chaser and The Yellow Sea both redefined the thriller into modern effective tales of woe and shock, The Wailing defines what a modern horror film should look like while retaining the same effective style and writing that made his previous two outings so bold and real. This film will knock the wind out of you. It’s a film that defines the best of what horror has to offer by building a real world with characters you care for…and then utterly destroying it all in front of you. The Wailing is the kind of outsider cinema that every film maker should want to make - thoughtful, shocking, thrilling, and ultimately devastating.