Hope (2026)

A decade after The Wailing, South Korean genre maestro Na Hong-jin returns with a spectacularly unruly monster epic that takes the basic machinery of Jaws and unleashes it upon a remote community near the Korean Demilitarized Zone. After a mutilated animal is discovered near the seaside town of Hope Harbor, police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and junior officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon) investigate just as something enormous begins tearing through the village, setting off an escalating battle for survival against a threat nobody can quite comprehend. Na initially keeps the danger tantalizingly out of sight before exploding into astonishingly sustained chases, firefights, creature attacks, and physical comedy, expanding the brutality and gallows humor of his earlier films to blockbuster scale. An international ensemble that includes Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell only deepens the film’s increasingly strange dimensions as the distinction between predator and prey begins to blur, complicating our sympathies and asking what separates the monsters onscreen from the people determined to destroy them. Excessive, funny, violent, and exhilaratingly unpredictable, Hope is a rare science-fiction spectacle willing to let its considerable resources serve a filmmaker’s eccentricities rather than sand them away.