Hope: The Most Expensive South Korean Movie of All Time
THE VERDICT:
South Korean cinema has been on a crazy bender. The last decade has brought household names like Parasite, The Handmaiden, and Train to Busan. At the same time, the world has witnessed gems like Decision to Leave, Burning, and The Wailing. Last year's enthusiasm for Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice was another reminder that Korean cinema can still turn a domestic release into an international event. And this year, Lee Chang-dong returned after eight years with Possible Love, premiering in competition at Venice before making its way to Toronto and New York to considerable acclaim. It's clear: South Korean cinema continues to excite audiences worldwide.
Within this slew of new movies is Na Hong-jin's Hope. On paper, Hope has almost everything going for it. First and foremost, Hope is an absolute giant of a movie. With a reported budget of around $46 million, it officially became the most expensive South Korean movie ever made. That is a significant distinction in an industry whose international reputation has been built, in large part, on directors doing extraordinary things without Hollywood-scale budgets. The budget also brought an all-star cast, with Jung Ho-yeon (Squid Game), Hwang Jung-min (The Wailing), and Zo In-sung (Moving) leading the Korean ensemble, alongside Michael Fassbender and Taylor Russell—Hollywood power players that only add to the intrigue.
Second, Na was coming off a nearly decade-long hiatus after The Wailing. There is a reason The Wailing was mentioned among the titles in the paragraph above. Its twisted narrative and unavoidable dread are powerful and heavy. It is a movie that seems determined to make you uncomfortable and then refuses to let you know exactly why. Its sprawling runtime never feels like a burden because Na understands how to make uncertainty itself compelling. With a fantastic edit to go along with it, Na’s previous effort became an immediate modern horror classic. It is no surprise that the film earned him Best Director at the 37th Blue Dragon Film Awards.
Third, Hope was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. That alone is extraordinary. Cannes does not exactly have a history of filling its Competition lineup with monster-action movies. And yet Hope arrived in France as an apocalyptic creature feature from one of South Korea's most acclaimed genre directors, surrounded by films from the kind of auteurs whose names are usually enough to tell you what kind of movie you are about to watch. Na Hong-jin's name, Cannes, the biggest budget in a country's history, nearly ten years of anticipation, and the promise of a giant sci-fi monster movie. Put all of that together and it becomes increasingly clear why the bar was in the stratosphere.
Hope was not set out to be a typical action flick. It was Na Hong-jin's Korean monster-action movie backed by enough money and star power to bring the thoughtful horror of The Wailing to an entirely different scale. But enough about expectations. What's the verdict? It's bad. Very bad.
The opening half hour is relatively inoffensive with some fantastic action and cinematography. The images are fresh and stunning. All of the actors understand their assignment. Specifically, Hwang Jung-min has the kind of screen presence that makes even the movie's stranger moments feel grounded and human, while Jung Ho-yeon and Zo In-sung are both given moments where they remind you why you were excited to see them here. The humor is also genuinely underrated. There are several moments where Hope is funny in a way that feels completely at odds with its apocalyptic premise, and those moments are some of the few times the movie seems to step into something new. These factors combine to form a charming first 30 minutes.
Then the next 130 minutes occur.
At 2 hours and 40 minutes, Hope is long enough that its clear lack of direction becomes impossible to ignore. The movie constantly seems to be preparing itself for the next big thing without ever deciding what that thing should be. Its action gets bigger, its plot gets increasingly convoluted, and its characters get shuffled from one crisis to another, but the movie itself doesn't seem to move very far. The action, which was a token of success at the beginning of the movie, becomes mind-numbing and pointless—a similar sensation experienced in Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning which had been released a year prior.
In particular, there is one car stunt that, on its own, is fantastic. A police car launches into a full 180-degree turn, reverses its momentum, and accelerates quickly as the tire rubber burns and the dirt kicks up. The camera whips around to follow it once more and you are left exhilarated the first time you see it. But when it happens again. And again. And again. And then, somehow, again. You are left wondering how the move could possibly be appropriate in that scenario.
Tragically, this stunt is an accurate analogy to describe Hope. A movie doing 180 degree turns for 2 hours and 40 minutes straight—where the movie constantly throws itself in one direction before violently swinging back in the opposite direction. Again. And again. As the movie lugs its audience back and forth, back and forth, with increasingly elaborate explosions to convince us that we're moving somewhere. We are left wondering, have we moved at all?
And then there are the monsters. The CGI is satirically atrocious. There is no polite way to put this: the monster design is hideous, and the effects are so artificial that their appearances actively pull you out of the movie experience. This is especially unfortunate because Hope is otherwise a gorgeous film. Na knows how to frame a landscape, how to stage a chase, and how to effectively make scenes feel enormous. And then the creature will appear.
The problem isn't simply that the CGI looks bad. Plenty of great movies have bad effects. The Thing had a fraction of Hope's budget and created effects that still look extraordinary because they feel tactile, physical, and disgusting. Mad Max: Fury Road is filled with digital effects, but they are so seamlessly integrated into the physical filmmaking that you rarely stop to think about them. Even movies with famously questionable effects like Cats at least produce an image so bizarre that the artificiality becomes part of the experience. Hope resides within the worst of both worlds. And for a movie this expensive, that is difficult to overlook.
But the CGI isn't what ultimately kills Hope. It's the fact that there is zero weight to any character, plot point, or conflict in this movie. Something The Wailing did that I admire is how it got you to care for every relationship you see on-screen. That is what made the conflict in that movie so terrifying. You didn't want to see the characters you had grown to root for get taken away.
Think about Jong-gu and his daughter. Before The Wailing asks you to fear the supernatural, it gives you a father who loves his daughter. That relationship becomes the center of the horror. When something truly horrific threatens her, there’s a cinematic urgency that Na captures brilliantly. Hope never gives us that feeling.
The characters aren't completely devoid of life. The actors are too good for that. But they are remarkably devoid of anything interesting. I never felt like I knew these people well enough to fear what might happen to them. The movie constantly gives us things to look at, but very little to care about. So when Na chooses to end the movie with the seemingly random, ridiculous “death” of one of our protagonists, I was almost impressed by the confidence of it. It is an ending that desperately wants a reaction. It wants the audience to sit there in disbelief. And I did.
Was it surprising? Yes. Did I care? No. Then, of course, the end-credit scene reveals that he's alive again. Was that surprising? Yes. Did I care? Again, no. At that point, Hope had somehow managed to make a character's death feel weightless twice.
And that is the real tragedy of the movie. Na has built something enormous, but almost nothing inside of it feels heavy.
THE AFTERMATH:
When Hope first premiered in South Korea, its opening weekend was accompanied by an exclusive interview with Na Hong-jin. I had never attended an opening-weekend premiere where the director came out afterward to answer questions, so it’s fair to say that I was excited for more than the movie itself. I was also curious to hear what Na had to say about his first film in nearly a decade. What I was not expecting was for the interview to change the way I thought about what I had just watched. In some ways, I found the conversation more interesting than the film.
Na spoke openly about the difficulty of finishing Hope in time for Cannes. The film had taken years to reach the screen, only for its final stretch to become a frantic race toward its premiere. He described the Cannes experience as intensely stressful and painful, and most strikingly, he spoke about sitting in the theater and watching his own movie there for the first time as something close to a nightmare. Hearing this immediately complicated my response to the film. I still thought Hope was bad, and nothing Na said could change that. But it was difficult not to feel some sympathy for him when he spoke so openly about the experience. More importantly, it was obvious how much he cared about the movie. The problems I had spent the last three hours noticing were not problems he seemed unaware of; they were part of a film that had clearly demanded an enormous amount from him.
That realization does not excuse Hope. The CGI is still disappointing, the action is still repetitive, and the movie is still far too long. Its characters remain too thin for its ending to carry the emotional weight it wants to carry. But after hearing Na speak, I found myself thinking less about whether the movie was successful and more about why it felt so incomplete. There is an enormous amount of ambition in Hope: the elaborate action, the creature design, the international cast, the apocalyptic scale, the strange humor, and the constant shifts in tone. The movie is always reaching for something larger. What frustrated me was that I could see the shape of the film it wanted to become without ever feeling that it had fully arrived there.
Maybe that is what makes Hope more interesting to me now than it was when I walked out of the theater. I left thinking I had watched a disappointing movie. After hearing Na speak, I began to think of it as something closer to a movie caught halfway through becoming itself. The distinction does not make the film's failures disappear, and I do not think an audience should have to compensate for the circumstances of a production in order to appreciate its final product. But it does change the way I understand those failures. The movie's excess begins to feel less like empty spectacle and more like evidence of a filmmaker trying to fit too many ideas into something that ultimately needed more time to take shape.
I hope Na is able to look back on Hope as a directorial exercise, a film through which he could push himself toward the things he wanted to explore: action, world-building, genre, scale, and the possibilities of working on a production far larger than anything he had attempted before. Because beneath all of that ambition, I still see the filmmaker who made The Wailing. I still see the filmmaker who understood how to make an enormous film feel intimate, how to make uncertainty frightening, and, most importantly, how to make an audience care about people before asking them to be afraid for them. Hope has plenty to look at, but I kept wishing it had given me something to hold onto.
That is ultimately what I wanted from Hope. I would rather see Na Hong-jin make a smaller movie that gives me a reason to care than a bigger one that simply gives me more to look at.
Yul Choi is a Freshman at Columbia College studying Political Science. He is a staff writer for Double Exposure and enjoys eating good sushi, writing, and listening to rnb.