Hope opens in US theaters on Wednesday 9 September, the first film from Na Hong-jin since The Wailing in 2016. Neon gave it a head start on 7 September with premium large-format screenings, and it also handles the UK and Ireland, where the film arrives on 25 September. In Australia, Madman opens it on 10 September. It premiered in competition at Cannes in May.
The story is set in Hope Harbor, an isolated village near Korea's demilitarized zone. When police chief Bum-seok and his rookie officer Sung-ae are sent to look into reports of a strange creature, what looks like a wildlife scare turns into a fight for survival that spirals toward cosmic horror. Hwang Jung-min and Zo In-sung lead the cast, and Michael Fassbender's presence makes it an unusually international ensemble for a Korean-language film.
Na shot Hope back in 2023 and spent years shaping it in the edit before it was ready for Cannes, where it became his first film selected for the Palme d'Or competition. That patience tracks with a director whose two previous features, The Chaser and The Wailing, built their reputations on tightly controlled tension rather than speed to market.
It is Na's biggest production by some distance, trading the grounded procedurals of his earlier work for full creature-feature spectacle, and its 68 on Metacritic reads as a film that divides its audience rather than losing it, which fits his history of unsettling, hard-to-categorize genre work.
What is still unclear is whether that shift toward blockbuster machinery will sit alongside the slow-burn dread that made his name, or dilute it. The Chaser and The Wailing earned their reputations by withholding; Hope has to prove that a director this patient can also deliver a monster.
