The new trailer for Hope locks in what had only been rumored: a September 9 North American release from Neon, following a July 15 debut in South Korea through Plus M Entertainment.
It confirms the setup too. In the fictional border town of Hope Harbor, near the DMZ, police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon) investigate a creature tearing through the village, while a band of hunters led by Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) tracks it into the surrounding forest. Hwang returns to Na Hong-jin's world for the first time since The Wailing, and Hoyeon's presence marks the Squid Game breakout's feature film debut in a leading role.
This trailer moves past the earlier, more contained monster-hunt footage and reveals the film's real scale: the final shots show an alien spacecraft crossing the sky above the devastated village, confirming Hope as a full science fiction story rather than a grounded creature feature. That widens the cast beyond the Korean leads to include Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton in supporting roles, a scope not evident from the first-look material. The synopsis line, that what begins as misjudgment spirals through human conflict into tragedy on a cosmic scale, points to a structure built on escalation rather than a single reveal.
Hope is Na Hong-jin's first feature in roughly a decade, following The Wailing in 2016 and The Chaser before that, both defined by slow-building dread that curdles into violence. Its $33 million budget makes it the most expensive Korean production to date, and the figure tracks with the trailer's shift from village thriller to spacecraft-scale spectacle. The film premiered in competition at Cannes in May, where it drew a six-minute standing ovation, an unusually long response even by festival standards, and left the room genuinely divided.
That division is easy to understand from the footage: the back half looks like a swerve into creature-feature excess, and the tonal whiplash is clearly the point. The trailer plays that gamble straight: a slow-burn police procedural that detonates into alien spectacle without much of a bridge between the two. Whether that structure holds up over a full runtime, this footage suggests Na is betting on scale and escalation over the sustained dread that made The Wailing work, a riskier trade this trailer alone cannot settle.
