by Elisa Giudici
There’s something genuinely startling about seeing the sprawling sci-fi epic Hope in Competition at Cannes. Not because genre films are unwelcome on the Croisette anymore; that battle has largely been wo. The surprise is that Na Hong-jin’s film embraces blockbuster language so wholeheartedly. This is not elevated horror masquerading as arthouse cinema, nor a restrained science-fiction allegory carefully calibrated for festival audiences. Hope is loud, enormous, messy, violent, and frequently exhilarating entertainment. It's a film with giant creatures, extended chase sequences, exploding buildings, machine guns, and a level of visual maximalism that feels almost aggressively unconcerned with prestige filmmaking etiquette...
That alone makes Thierry Frémaux’s decision to place it in Competition feel significant. Hope isn’t simply a Korean blockbuster premiering at Cannes; it feels like a test case for whether cinema this unapologetically spectacle-driven can now be discussed within the same artistic framework traditionally reserved for more solemn auteur fare. The answer, at least partially, is yes. Because even when Hope stumbles, and it does, its sheer directorial force is impossible to dismiss.
Na Hong-jin, still best known internationally for The Wailing, has spent years developing the project as an ambitious collision of genres: apocalyptic thriller, creature feature, survival western, horror film, and science-fiction epic folded into one. Set near the border between North and South Korea, the film cleverly uses the geopolitical tension of the region to establish a population already accustomed to militarization. Fishermen know how to reload ammunition, local union members casually handle rifles, and the sudden appearance of a mysterious creature tearing through homes and businesses doesn’t trigger panic so much as a collective hunting instinct.
At the center of the chaos is Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the local police chief and one of the film’s more irritating creations: a man broadly dismissed as incompetent, almost comically out of his depth, even before the monsters arrive. In its opening stretch (arguably the film’s strongest section) Hope plays almost like a classic kaiju mystery, withholding the full appearance of its creature while building tension through destruction, atmosphere, and uncertainty. There’s a grim humor to Bum-seok’s presence too; in his own way, he often feels nearly as dangerous as the thing he’s chasing.
HOPE
As the narrative expands, the film splinters into parallel pursuits involving multiple creatures and different groups of hunters moving through forests and isolated terrain. It’s here that Hope becomes far stranger and, visually speaking, considerably more exciting. For reasons the film never fully explains, the creatures refuse to attack horses, allowing Na to stage extraordinary mounted action sequences that merge western iconography with horror choreography. Some of these scenes are among the most kinetically impressive set pieces to premiere at Cannes this year, filled with sweeping camera movement, bursts of grotesque imagery, sudden slow motion, and a remarkable sense of spatial clarity despite the chaos.
Visually, Hope rarely stops surprising. Police chases evoke the muscular grammar of 1970s crime cinema filtered through the velocity of Miami Vice. The forest sequences drift closer to Korean horror and survival thrillers while borrowing liberally from westerns. Na Hong-jin directs with immense confidence, constantly searching for images large enough to justify the film’s gargantuan scale. And yet the larger Hope becomes, the more its weaknesses begin to surface.
At nearly 160 minutes, the film repeatedly changes shape, tone, and narrative direction, often in ways that feel more instinctive than fully controlled. Na’s influences become increasingly visible as the story unfolds: Spielberg, Alien, Korean genre cinema, anime, and especially Attack on Titan, whose DNA feels deeply embedded in the creature design and the human-versus-monster dynamics. One creature launches projectiles back at attackers, another moves at terrifying speed on all fours, another manipulates armor-like bone structures. Whether intentional or not, the similarities are difficult to ignore.
But those comparisons also highlight what Hope lacks. The film’s characters rarely develop beyond broad archetypes, and unlike something like Mad Max: Fury Road (a comparison some audience members have already made) the thin characterization doesn’t acquire mythic force through performance or emotional clarity. Bum-seok remains largely defined by his incompetence until the screenplay suddenly requires otherwise. Supporting characters exist more as functional genre pieces than emotionally persuasive individuals. Even the monsters eventually lose some of their mystique once the film begins overexplaining itself in preparation for what is very obviously intended as a larger franchise.
Still, I found myself admiring Hope even when it frustrated me. There’s something undeniably compelling about a filmmaker pushing Korean blockbuster cinema toward this level of industrial and visual ambition without softening its excesses for international audiences. The film occasionally reinforces the old divide between “serious” cinema and spectacle rather than transcending it, but Na Hong-jin’s commitment to scale and movement remains fascinating throughout.
In that sense, the closest comparison may actually be James Cameron’s Avatar: a film driven less by narrative sophistication than by the desire to expand the technical and sensory possibilities of large-scale filmmaking. Like Cameron, Na seems primarily interested in immersion, propulsion, and visual construction rather than psychological depth.
Whether that will be enough for Cannes juries remains uncertain, though it’s difficult to imagine Hope leaving the festival without some kind of recognition. Park Chan-wook presides over this year’s jury, and Na Hong-jin has undeniably delivered some of the most thrillingly directed sequences of the entire Competition lineup. If the film never fully finds characters or emotional stakes equal to its astonishing visual dynamism, it still announces something important: Korean blockbuster filmmaking no longer feels content merely competing with Hollywood commercially. With Hope, it’s openly challenging Hollywood on the level of spectacle itself.