Hope is a remote port town on the Korean coast, not far from the demilitarised zone. Signs of strange destruction begin appearing at its edges: torn-up ground, slaughtered livestock. Not a predator, and not people. Bum-seok, the chief of the local police outpost, and Sung-ae, a newly posted young officer, try to work out what is happening \u2014 while most of the area’s police have been diverted to fight wildfires and communication with the outside world has been cut. Up in the mountains, meanwhile, a local hunting party sets out after the creature, and it becomes clear soon enough that they are not the ones doing the hunting. What begins as ignorance escalates through human conflict into a tragedy of cosmic scale.<\/p>\n
It is Na Hong-jin’s first film since The Wailing (2016). He says the idea started from a single image that came to him in a restaurant around 2017 or 2018; in the years since, the project has grown into the most expensive Korean film ever made. Shooting took place in 2023, partly at the southern tip of South Korea in Haenam County, and partly in the Carpathians \u2014 in the forests of the Retezat mountains, whose wildness the director sought out specifically. Hong Kyung-pyo, who shot The Wailing (as well as Parasite and Burning), is behind the camera; the score is by Michael Abels.<\/p>\n
Hwang Jung-min plays the police chief, Zo In-sung the hunter, and Hoyeon (of Squid Game) the young officer. The other half of the film belongs to Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton \u2014 none of whom speak Korean in it. Fassbender and Vikander, married in real life, are working together on screen for the first time since 2016.<\/p>\n
The film premiered in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, where it ran for the Palme d’Or \u2014 the first Korean film in the main competition since Decision to Leave (2022), and Na’s fourth appearance at the festival. The critical response has been broadly favourable: reviewers singled out Na’s direction of the action, while several found the visual effects weak. The BBC gave it four stars out of five and called it the must-see monster movie of the year. At home it opened to the strongest weekend of 2026, and it set a sales record for a Korean film internationally.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hope is a remote port town on the Korean coast, not far from the demilitarised zone. Signs of strange destruction begin appearing at its edges: torn-up ground, slaughtered livestock. Not a predator, and not people. Bum-seok, the chief of the local police outpost, and Sung-ae, a newly posted young officer, try to work out what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n