TIFF 2026 Movie Review: ‘Hope’ is Cinema at Its Purest
There isn’t a better way to open the 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival than with a special screening of Na Hong-jin’s Hope. This is the South Korean genre artist’s first feature in ten years, following the masterful The Wailing in 2016.
It’s been a while, which made the prospect of a Cannes premiere all the more special for a filmmaker who hasn’t fully received the same flowers that other Korean directors such as Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho have. That’s an incredible shame, considering the level he’s been operating at ever since he blew us all away with The Chaser in 2008.
Hope is an all-killer, no-filler, 160-minute piece of action filmmaking
You’ll either like or vehemently detest Hope, and that all hinges on your appreciation of the CGI aliens. Once revealed, they look like they were generated by the same visual effects artists behind the late Chuck Russell’s The Scorpion King or the memeable 2010 Ghanaian film 2016.
Some won’t be able to overlook how chintzy (and unfinished) the aliens look, portrayed by Cameron Britton, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell. Others will go along for the ride, simply because Na is in a league of his own when crafting spectacularly mind-melting action that perfectly distills where the genre is going after some thrilling shakeups over the past twenty years.
Hope honors the legacy of pure action blockbusters. Chief among them being Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise, which drives Hope’s action setpieces: three extended chase scenes that form the bulk of its nearly three-hour runtime.
The film’s plot, cast, and laughable CGI
At first, the build-up towards the CGI alien reveal is deliberate and patient, as Na jumps us into Hope Harbor in media res, where the village’s police chief, Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), investigates what he believes is animal destruction.
As the townspeople attempt to fight back (and miserably fail) to muster up any resistance to what is actually an alien, Na stages his first chase scene, one so unbelievable it almost defies categorization. That sequence reaches its apotheosis once the alien’s design is revealed, which received relentless laughter from the audience during the screening.
However, there was something so pure and earnest about the way it was designed, as unfinished as it looked, that its imperfections almost acted as a feature rather than a bug. This is especially apparent when the alien, emerging from the rooftops, obliterates one civilian with another. The emotional weight is there, heightened by a visual language that owes much to George Miller’s center framing, which he pioneered over the decades with his Mad Max franchise.
The way Na constantly guides the viewer’s eye as the frame envelops us in the film’s lush woodlands is genuinely awe-inspiring. Hope often delivers enough surprises to keep us on the edge of our seats, even if the visual effects can look ridiculous.
If anything, the visuals reminded me a lot of S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR, where the animals didn’t look so believable (or lifelike), but the photography is so incredibly vivid and intuitive that any imperfections seemed purposeful.
When Na and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (a frequent collaborator of Bong Joon-ho) stage a digitized close-up of the alien, in complete distress, shedding tears, as Bum-seok looks at it, the “artifice” is completely removed by its soulful staging. The humanity of any given sequence lingers deep within us, even if Hope can frequently feel repetitive.
For a movie that runs relatively long, most of it is structured as a parallel investigation, where we follow the police in the city and a group of hunters in the woods. These scenes eventually lead to chases, which are the main draw of a film that doesn’t want to simply tell an isolated story but has plenty of ideas to set up for more.
If there’s a flaw in Hope’s pacing, it’s how the movie ends: it abruptly sets up a sequel we likely won’t see through to fruition, even if Na is confident audiences will embark on the ride and clamor for more. It makes the movie’s gargantuan stakes feel less urgent, especially after a spaceship crash-lands on Earth, in a scene that dazzles as one of the most astonishing demonstrations of visual effects we’ve seen in the Korean film industry.
But does it really matter when each action set piece is so mind-melting and the performances from its cast are deeply felt? Listen, when Na stages a bravura final chase that recalls both Transformers: Dark of the Moon (the best one) and Mad Max: Fury Road, smashing them together inside Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, who are you to complain? The artistry on display is so indelible that any perceived “flaw” doesn’t hold weight anymore.
I trust you’ve never seen anything like what Na stages in his final hour: a relentless demonstration of his desire to change the action landscape for good, especially in an era when large-scale blockbuster sequences have lost all sense of aesthetics and weight.
Hope (2026) film rating and final thoughts
Hope is pure emotion from beginning to end. Whether in the impassioned performance from Hoyeon, a true capital-S movie star, or in Na’s desires to reshape our perception of action as a genuine art in its own right. There are various ways in which the movie will take your breath away if you surrender to its precise aesthetics and dadaist images.
It might fumble the bag in its conclusion. But if anything, it will hopefully (pun intended) pave the way for Na to make another movie as quickly as possible, so we don’t have to wait ten years for his next genre masterpiece.
The world may not be ready for Hope now. But its defenders will be there when it will inevitably get reappraised in a decade from now as a benchmark of the sci-fi genre and one of the most influential action movies of the 2020s. You’ve heard it here first.
Find our previous reviews from TIFF and other film festivals here in the archive!
