Image credit: Courtesy of NEONA trailer stopped us in our tracks.
At first, HOPE looks like a tense survival thriller: a remote South Korean community, police, hunters and something dangerous moving through the mountains.
The locals initially suspect a tiger.
They are wrong.
Director Na Hong-jin, best known internationally for The Wailing, returns to feature filmmaking after a decade with a story that moves from creature feature into science fiction and cosmic horror.
SOMETHING HAS ARRIVED
Set around the isolated fictional community of Hope near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the story begins after mysterious attacks send a local police chief and hunters into the surrounding wilderness.
Communications fail. People become separated. And the hunters begin to realize something may be hunting them.
The official Cannes synopsis describes what follows as a "tragedy of cosmic proportions."
That's appropriate, because the threat isn't simply an unknown animal.
Something extraterrestrial has arrived.
A FORMIDABLE CAST
HOPE stars Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung and Squid Game breakout Hoyeon, alongside an unusually recognizable group portraying the film's alien visitors: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton.
Rather than treating its creatures as anonymous monsters, HOPE appears to have something considerably more ambitious in mind.
Na Hong-jin hasn't directed a feature since The Wailing in 2016, a film celebrated for mixing horror, mystery, folklore and supernatural ambiguity. This time, he's working on a much larger canvas.
The roughly 160-minute film premiered in competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival before moving through the international festival circuit and into theaters.
Na has even revealed that he's already written a screenplay for a potential sequel.
For now, one movie is enough to get our attention.
A remote village. Something moving through the wilderness. A hunting party that discovers it may actually be the prey.
And visitors who came from much farther away than anyone expected.
That is our kind of signal.
HOPE is now playing in U.S. theaters.