Hope: The Most Expensive Korean Film Ever Made Puts Fassbender and Vikander in a Monster Movie

Photo: ENoz, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Na Hong-jin made The Wailing, which is still one of the scariest films I have ever sat through, so a decade of waiting for his next one was always going to end with high expectations. Hope is finally doing the rounds internationally, and it is a strange, enormous thing: a Korean sci-fi thriller, reportedly the most expensive in the country's history, with Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as extraterrestrials who arrive in a coastal town called Hope Harbor.

The local story belongs to Hwang Jung-min as a police chief and Zo In-sung as his rookie deputy, trying to protect the village from a creature while a hunting party realises it has become the hunted. Jung Ho-yeon from Squid Game and Taylor Russell round out the cast. Fassbender and Vikander are married in real life and this is their first film together in ten years, which is a fun footnote even if their roles are deliberately kept mysterious.

The Cannes reaction was split. Critics loved the action filmmaking and were much harder on the visual effects, which is a worrying note for a film built around an alien. It has done modest business so far on a budget around 46 million dollars. I still want to see it, because Na Hong-jin on an off day is more interesting than most directors on a good one. Have you managed to catch it yet?