Hope (2026): Na Hong-jin's Korean Sci-Fi Creature Epic, and Is It Scary?

Hope premiered in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2026, where it drew a six-minute standing ovation and sharply divided reviews. It opens in South Korean theaters on July 15, 2026, through Plus M Entertainment, with the top advance-ticket numbers on Korea's ticketing network in the week before release. Its North American premiere is at the New York Asian Film Festival on July 20, where it screens as the centerpiece film.

Neon then gives it a US theatrical release on Wednesday, September 9, 2026. The US trailer arrived on July 9. No US streaming plan has been announced.

Hope is set in Hope Harbor, a remote village near the Korean border. After wildfires knock out communications, village police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and rookie officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon) are called to deal with a creature that has begun attacking the community, while a local hunting party sets out after it and finds the roles reversed. The official synopsis describes a chain of ignorance and human conflict that escalates into "a tragedy of cosmic proportions."

The scale is unusual for Korean cinema. A reported budget of more than 50 billion won makes Hope the most expensive Korean film ever made, and it sold to roughly 200 territories before release. Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton play the extraterrestrial characters, credited under names like Ma'veyyo and J'aur. Michael Abels, the composer of Get Out, Us, and Nope, wrote the score.

Not by the story, no. Hope is an original screenplay, not a sequel or a spin-off, and nothing in it continues The Wailing.

What carries over is behind the camera. Hope is Na Hong-jin's first feature since The Wailing in 2016, and he wrote, directed, and produced it. Hwang Jung-min, who played the shaman in The Wailing, leads the cast here as the village police chief, and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who shot The Wailing, is back too. The register is a good deal different, though. The Wailing was a supernatural horror film that kept its evil ambiguous, and Hope is a science-fiction creature film built around a threat you can see and a lot of large-scale action. If you are expecting that same slow occult dread, this is a louder film than that.

Hope is a Korean-language film with some English dialogue. Its Western cast members do not play English-speaking characters in the usual sense: Fassbender, Vikander, Russell, and Britton play extraterrestrials who speak an invented language created for the film, which is subtitled for every audience, including in Korea.

Expect the US release to screen in Korean and the alien language with English subtitles. Neon has not announced an English dub, and its foreign-language releases typically screen subtitled. If that changes we will update this page.

It is more of a creature feature than a straight horror film. Reviews out of Cannes describe long stretches of action and spectacle, a fair amount of gore, and a tone that keeps shifting between tension and dark comedy. A few critics made the point that the creature is at its scariest early, before the film shows it in full, and that it gets less frightening after that. If you are going in for the sustained dread of The Wailing, most accounts say this is not really that.

The festival reception was split. Out of Cannes it holds an 82% Rotten Tomatoes score and a Metacritic score in the high 60s, with the praise going to the action filmmaking and most of the criticism going to the visual effects. The Hollywood Reporter called it a rip-roaring creature feature with instant cult-classic energy; IndieWire was a lot harsher. We have not seen it ourselves yet, so there are no Darkly scores to give you. Once we watch it, its Fear, Gore, Atmosphere, Intensity, and Overall scores will go up on the film page.