Hope Is the Most Expensive Korean Movie Ever Made. It Just Lost the Weekend to Practical Magic 2 by Nine to One. Go Anyway.

Here are the numbers, and then we will get to the movie. Hope opened in North America on Wednesday, September 9, and after five days it has made $4.9 million. Practical Magic 2 made $30 million in three. NEON put Na Hong-jin's film on 1,560 screens, which is a real release for a subtitled Korean movie, and it landed seventh for the weekend, one spot ahead of an Insidious sequel in its fourth week. Nobody is going.

That is the wrong outcome, and not because Hope is a masterpiece. It is not. It is a 157-minute alien invasion that spends its first hour as the best action movie of the year and its last forty minutes arguing with itself about what kind of movie it is. But you will be talking about it in October. We flagged it as the one to see in our weekend guide. Now that we have sat with it, here is the full case.

Ten years, one image, and the biggest budget in Korean history

Na Hong-jin has directed four features in eighteen years: The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, The Wailing, and now this. The Wailing is the film that convinced a lot of American viewers that Korean horror was doing things Hollywood was not, and Na has said Hope started as a single image he pictured over dinner around 2017. It took the rest of the decade to build.

The budget is reported at $46 million, and some Korean outlets put the final figure above $70 million. Either number makes it the most expensive Korean film ever produced. It shot in 2023 in South Korea and Romania, premiered in competition at Cannes in May (the first Korean film in the main competition since Decision to Leave), opened in Korea on July 15 to an $11.3 million weekend, and has grossed about $42 million worldwide.

Then there is the cast, which reads like a prank. Hwang Jung-min and Zo In-sung are two of the biggest actors in Korea, Hoyeon is the Squid Game breakout, and the aliens are played in motion capture by Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton. This is a real movie that exists.

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The setup, and why there are no phones

Hope Harbor is a small coastal town near the DMZ, populated mostly by old people, and the film is set sometime before the 2000s. Na has said that was practical: a cell phone would defuse every scene where someone cannot reach someone else. It also lets him play the town's Cold War nerves straight. Everyone here has a rifle.

A cow turns up mutilated. The police chief, Go Bum-seok (Hwang), blames a tiger. His rookie officer, Lim Sung-ae (Hoyeon), does not buy it. Wildfires have cut the roads and the radio, so when something starts killing people there are no reinforcements, just the chief, the rookie, a retired colonel, and a headstrong local tracker (Zo In-sung) who thinks he can handle it. Then the first creature dies, someone looks closely at the body, and the movie changes shape.

It takes almost an hour before you see the thing clearly. That is a Jaws move, and Na earns it with dread, dark comedy, and a chief who is the wrong man for this and knows it. Hwang Jung-min plays arrogance curdling into panic better than anyone working, and the film lets him be small.

The action is the argument

Na storyboarded every set piece and shot as much of the high-speed material as he could without leaning on CG. The result is a run of daylight action nobody else is staging right now: a tanker truck on a coast road, a horseback pursuit through a forest lit only by the sun (Hong Kyung-pyo, who shot The Wailing and Parasite, is the cinematographer), and a car chase that IGN's Siddhant Adlakha said would have you "falling off your seat." The creature moves as fast as a car, and the camera stays low enough that you believe it.

The performances are built for it. Hoyeon gets the physical role of her career and is fearless in it. Zo In-sung plays the tracker like a man who has waited his whole life for an emergency, which is both the funniest and saddest thing in the film. Michael Abels, who scored Get Out and Nope, provides the music.

Do yourself a favour and surrender to this entertaining, unwieldy and goofy spectacle. Much like its monster, it runs amok.Harry Stainer, Empire

The effects are the problem, and Na says that is on purpose

Every negative review lands on the same thing. The aliens, in motion and in full light, look like an earlier era of digital effects. Slant called them "hilariously unconvincing." IndieWire's headline says the film is "undone by terrible CGI." The Rotten Tomatoes consensus calls the effects "amusingly quaint," which is generous and not wrong.

Here is the wrinkle. Na has defended the look as a choice: he did not want the aliens to read as obviously alien, so the audience would sit in the same uncertainty as the townspeople. He spent the summer after Cannes refining the effects, but the design philosophy did not change. Whether you buy that is the whole question of the movie. I mostly did, the same way the rubber suits in a Toho picture stop mattering after ten minutes. If you need seamless, this will lose you.

The third act, and the hero problem

Once the film reveals what the visitors actually are, and that there is a hierarchy among them, it shifts from monster movie to something closer to a first-contact tragedy. Fassbender, Vikander, and Russell arrive late and are much better than the effects around them. There is a young prince the visitors are trying to revive, a bodyguard willing to give up his own heart to do it, and an empress giving the orders. The humans, meanwhile, keep shooting.

That is the point, and it is a sharp one: the movie sets up a hero narrative and then dismantles it until you realize the townspeople are the invasion from the aliens' side. Mashable's Kristy Puchko called it a film that "roars with the intensity of Hollywood blockbusters without compromising its unnerving commentary." The problem is pacing. The last forty minutes repeat beats the second act already landed, and Variety's word for it, "overlong," is fair. A mid-credits scene sets up a story Na may never get to tell.

Verdict

Hope is a genuine event marketed like an afterthought. It has one of the great first hours in recent genre cinema, a lead performance that goes somewhere most blockbusters will not let their stars go, and a third act that could lose twenty minutes without losing a thing. The effects will be a dealbreaker for some. For everyone else, this is the rare $46 million movie that feels like one person's obsession. It is rated R, subtitled, and 157 minutes.

See it on the biggest screen you can find. Then rank it. Our Alien movies ranked and Godzilla movies ranked tier lists are the obvious neighbors, and the tier list guide walks through how head-to-head ranking on Shortlist works. If you are on the fence, Resident Evil opens Friday and will take most of these screens. This is the week.

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