The first official trailer for “Hope” has arrived, and after a Cannes premiere that positioned it as one of the year’s biggest genre swings, South Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin’s latest looks every bit as strange, violent, and massive as advertised.
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The film marks Na’s first feature since “The Wailing,” his 2016 supernatural horror breakout, and this time he’s working on an even larger canvas. Set in the remote South Korean village of Hope Harbor, “Hope” follows police chief Bum-seok and officer Sung-ae after they are called in to investigate a mysterious creature that has wreaked havoc on the village. In the nearby forest, a group of hunters, including Sung-ki, sets out to track the beast, only to find themselves hunted instead.
But this is Na Hong-jin, so the creature-feature setup is only the beginning. NEON’s synopsis teases a story where “all is not as it seems, and perceptions can be misleading,” as ignorance, fear, and human conflict escalate into “a tragedy of cosmic proportions.”
The film stars Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Alicia Vikander, and Michael Fassbender, giving Na a major international ensemble for what appears to be his most ambitious film yet.
Our Cannes review was largely positive on the film’s unruly blockbuster scale, with Rafa Sales Ross writing that, “Despite the mid-runtime ebb and an overlong runtime that works against the film’s firm grasp on the slippery tautness of good action, ‘Hope’ still proves one hell of a time.” The review also called the film “meticulously engineered to cater to the big screen,” which is exactly the kind of pitch NEON is making here.
Na has never been much of a tidy genre filmmaker. “The Wailing” moved through procedural thriller, folk horror, possession nightmare, and spiritual apocalypse with terrifying confidence, and “Hope” looks like another collision of tones and terrors: monster movie, alien-invasion thriller, rural panic, action spectacle, and cosmic tragedy all folded into one very expensive-looking nightmare.
“Hope” opens in theaters through NEON on September 9. Watch the trailer below.
