An insane Korean creature feature | Hope (2026)
Is this how it ends?
I am Jason Kleeberg, this is Force Five, and today I’m going to give you 5 reasons you might like the 2026 film Hope, and make sure to stick around because at the end I’ll give you two top 5 lists this movie could easily make.
This is a must watch if you like creature features. The movie starts with a group of men checking out a dead cow that was clearly killed by something large and vicious. When the cop heads back into town, he discovers that the creature has beat him there and is tearing up the town. Now, I have to be honest, the CGI in this is awful. Like PS3 cutscene level bad. However, the actual creature designs are really varied and interesting and the scene of anticipation when Beom Seok, the town police chief is hunting for the creature through his harbor town is incredibly done. It’s straight out of the Jaws playbook, where the less you see, the better. In addition to Jaws, it feels a little bit like Tremors, Predator, The Host, and even maybe a little Nope.
His co-star, the absolutely badass police officer Sung Ae really steals the show on the human side. She’s played by Hoyeon, who you might know from Squid Game. She comes flying into the story behind the wheel of a cop car and hops out with a rifle mounted grenade launcher, immediately injecting an incredible amount of energy into the movie. She’s funny, physical, reckless, capable and feels like one of the more grounded characters in a movie where no one knows what they’re dealing with. She’s really cute too, people are about to have a new crush, guaranteed.
I really love big, aggressive movie scores and this is the most bombastic score I’ve heard in a very long time. Michael Abels, the composer behind Get Out, Us and Nope pushes this movie, specifically the action sequences, forward. The sound design in general is really good, especially the gunfire, explosions and car engines, but the score feels like it’s grabbing you by the neck and leading you through the best sequences in the movie, especially the final set piece as a car is driving while a creature is gaining on them. Abels’s score tightens the pressure perfectly. If you liked the massive sound of Nope, the tension of Johann Johannsson’s Sicaro score or Hans Zimmer when he scores action flicks, you’ll want to hear the Hope score on the biggest speakers possible.
The production design in this movie is Oscar worthy, especially in the first third of this film when we’re locked in Hope Harbor. While we don’t get to spend time in the town before it’s absolutely wrecked, it feels authentic, and that makes seeing the streets covered in carnage and bodies way more effective. The production designer Lee Hwok-Young and cinematographer Hong Kyung-Pyo, who also show Parasite and Burning make the village feel incredibly lived in yet filtered through a wood chipper where roofs are blown apart and walls are ripped open. It’s unsettling seeing innocent people halfway smashed through walls and there are plenty of them. The set design reminded me of films like Children of Men, War of the Worlds, Black Hawk Down and definitely The Host.
If you like directors who know how to stage gigantic action sequences, there’s a lot to love here. Na Hong-Jin went full Michael Bay with extended car chases, flying objects, exploding buildings, horseback sequences, and an insane final set piece that goes on way longer than it needed to. Na talked about writing action into the screenplay with an incredible amount of specificity, treating the script as a floor plan for how the sequences should function and you can tell - even when the cars, creatures, guns and horses are moving simultaneously, you understand the geography. This is someone who took the craft of action filmmaking extremely seriously. Even when the film gets weird, and it gets very weird, the ambition is impossible to ignore.
As for top 5 lists, I’ve got a few really solid ones that Hope could make. The first is Top 5 scenes where the character tells a story. Think, Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction telling the story about the watch. There’s a character who tells Hoyeon’s character about the first time he saw the monsters and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year. The second list this would easily land on is Top 5 Creepy Character Houses. There’s a scene where the police chief goes to a carpenter’s house to check out something in his freezer and his house would give serial killers nightmares. There are dead animals hanging from hooks in the ceiling, mannequins set up in suggestive poses, and other oddities lying around. When this comes out on 4K, I’m really looking forward to skipping through that scene frame by frame to find all of the creepy stuff I didn’t catch in the theater.
If you’ve seen Hope, what did you think of it? Was the CGI as distracting to you as it was to me? Let me know in the comments below and if you have a movie you want me to do a 5 reasons video for, I’d love to hear about that too. If you didn’t subscribe earlier, you can do it right here by clicking the logo and up there is another video YouTube think you’ll like. Finally, down below you’ll find links to buy a shirt and my other socials.
Life is short. Spend it with the people, and the movies, that you love.
