‘Hope’ Review – A Thrilling Throwback to the Big, Dumb Monster Movies of the 90s

It has been ten years since writer/director Na Hong-jin got behind the camera for his terrifying horror picture, The Wailing. Ten years since the filmmaker left us with our jaws open, gutted by that film’s shocking ending. For a decade, audiences have waited with eager anticipation for what new terror he’d unleash next. Now, we finally have an answer in the creature feature, Hope.

My friends, I’m thrilled to report…it was worth the wait.

Set in the South Korean town of Hope Harbor, we meet Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min), the sheriff of a small police force. His day begins with investigating a dead cow left in the road. Not just any dead cow, though. One with enormous claw marks left in its carcass. Some hunters think it might’ve been a tiger, but not Seok. Before long, he encounters the massive, vicious creature responsible as it tears through town, leaving destruction and bodies in its wake. Worse, there’s more than one. If the sheriff and anyone else want to make it out alive, they’ll need all the hope (and luck) they can get.

I grew up in the nineties. For me, that was the golden era of blockbuster monster movies: The Mummy, Deep Blue Sea, The Relic, and, yes, Jurassic Park. Big, often dumb, wildly entertaining, and thrilling creature features that took you on a ride. Thanks to less risk-taking and budgets saved for expensive superhero movies, they’re fewer and farther between these days. Hope is here to return us to the golden era of edge-of-your-seat monster movies.

A nearly three-hour film with two long chase sequences that make up a majority of the runtime, Hope is like Mad Max: Fury Road with monsters. Once we leave the dead cow, Seok heads to town, and the film takes off like a screaming banshee out of Hell. The poor bastard arrives just in time to find the village decimated. Buildings are torn up; Bloody bodies lie strewn about; Gunfire pops off in the distance while fires burn nearby. For what feels like the next hour, Hong-jin takes audiences through a chaotic warzone. We’re right there with Seok as he runs into group after group, some hiding, some fighting, all utterly incapable of bringing down the thing that has invaded their town.