Hope 2026 Movie Review
What a delight to watch a film so completely uninterested in behaving.
The first hour of Hope got to me in an almost physical way. The camera chases a threat that always seems to have just slipped out of frame, leaving behind bodies, smoke, and an entire town trying to understand what the hell is happening. You feel the movement before you understand what caused it. And Na Hong-jin takes so long to reveal what we’re looking for that the absence itself starts to feel more frightening than any creature could.
Hong Kyung-pyo shoots this chaos with a clarity that made me smile more than once. There’s a world behind the characters. There’s depth, distance, people made small inside huge spaces. Your eye can travel through the image and find something happening far from the center. Even during a chase, there’s pleasure in looking. After so many expensive films seeming afraid of the background, this almost feels luxurious.
And then all that wonderful tension starts turning into something else.
The absurdity creeps in from the edges and, by the time you notice, it has already taken over. The film can be genuinely terrifying and then suddenly land on something so ridiculous that it’s impossible not to laugh. I really like that lack of shame. It feels like the energy of someone who spent years collecting ideas and decided it would be a waste to choose only one.
But the same hunger that makes everything feel so alive also starts to weigh on the film. The more the threat takes shape, the more that initial anxiety loses some of its magic. Some explanations arrive while I was still perfectly happy without them. The mystery gets smaller as the film gets bigger.
Still, there’s such a great energy running through the whole thing that I find it hard to stay annoyed for long. Hwang Jung-min is wonderful in this kind of chaos because he can look terrified and funny within the same gesture. Hoyeon also brings a great physicality to it, that feeling of someone actually getting exhausted while running, stumbling, and trying to make sense of the impossible.
It’s a massive film that sometimes feels like it’s about to fall apart from sheer enthusiasm.
Maybe that’s exactly what I liked about it.
There are beautiful images, absurdly tense moments, and an almost childlike desire to keep making the game bigger just to see how far it can go. It doesn’t always hold together.
But when it does..
