After nearly a decade, Na Hong-jin is finally back in the director’s chair with a new movie that challenges the very concept of a traditional action flick. The Wailing, Na’s last film before the lengthy hiatus, pulled viewers into a spiraling Korean horror mystery with one of the wildest twists in the genre. Hong-jin built his career on the back of tightly-wound action thrillers like The Chaser and The Yellow Sea, but his latest film abandons the all-too-familiar slow-burn storytelling typical of mysteries for a pure sci-fi thrill ride that never lets off the gas.
For the movie’s U.S. release, Polygon hopped on a Zoom with Hong-jin to talk all things Hope — its breakneck pacing, the years-long process of designing its unique creatures, what it means to make an action spectacle after building one of the most distinctive thriller filmographies in modern cinema, and the director’s emphasis on achieving a sense of “speed” above all else.
“When we were shooting, that was the main thing we were focused on. We really wanted to continue this pace, this sense of speed, and have it persist throughout the entire runtime of the film,” Na says. “Doing that during production was extremely fun.”
Warning: There are minor spoilers for Hope in this article.
Welcome to Hope Harbor
Hope is a sprawling sci-fi action thriller set in the remote seaside village of Hope Harbor. At the start of the film, police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and rookie officer Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) are called to investigate a series of bizarre maulings from a mysterious, large creature. (Maybe a tiger snuck into town from the nearby North Korean border, the locals speculate.) As the situation spirals, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) heads into the surrounding mountains with a group of hunters to track down the beast — only to discover they might actually be the ones being hunted.
The first major stretch of Na’s 156-minute epic is a tense thriller as Bum-seok pursues the creature while only witnessing the deadly aftermath of its rampage, but by the one-hour mark an extraterrestrial disaster envelops the entire town that seems to defy explanation.
Na doesn’t let any of it sit still for long. Hope is packed with shots that feel like they’re barely keeping up with the action: cameras planted on the grilles of speeding cars, characters sprinting through forests with monsters tearing after them, and vehicles barreling through the rippled landscape. Even when the film pauses to let its characters breathe, there’s an overriding sense that something terrifying is lurking in the stillness, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. It’s a monster movie built around momentum.
We really wanted to get a very untraditional look at this kind of monster.
That same sense of speed extends to the design of the alien creatures. For Na, Hope was the perfect opportunity to make a monster movie with creatures that didn’t behave like those seen in other action blockbusters.
“When you see films like this, a lot of the time, the monster will be very slow. That is an approach we didn’t really want to take,” Na says. “Usually the monster comes out, and it goes boom, boom, and that’s sort of written in the narrative of these films. Whether it was games or animation, we really wanted to get a very untraditional look at this kind of monster, and that’s why speed was an incredible focus for us.”
Designing the Perfect Monster
Na and his team spent several years figuring out the specific creature design. “In the very beginning, realism was a big part of the conception of the creature design,” he says. But Hope went through such a long development process that they had to constantly reconsider what would feel fresh.
“We were kind of considering the current trends of creatures. There were creatures we were trying to avoid, of course, to avoid overlap with different films that were coming out. We’re like, ‘OK, we can’t use that idea because we want to create a more original and different character than what we see in other films that are coming out.’”
One of the main aliens in the film resembles the Labyrinth Madman from FromSoftware’s Bloodborne. The long-haired creature has a similarly unsettling silhouette even though it’s smaller in stature compared to the 10-foot-tall monster in Hope, but their chaotic movements are what truly sells the comparison. Both monsters move with a strange, animalistic speed that’s as jarring as it is terrifying, especially when they’re running directly at you. Na says Bloodborne didn’t influence Hope in any direct way, and adds that his creature design wasn’t based on any sort of pre-existing fiction or mythology at all.
It was almost disgusting to look at.
“It’s supposed to be an alien and almost anonymous, without a sense of identity,” he says. “I looked a lot to folklore, and Korean folklore actually doesn’t have a lot of creatures like this, so we had to kind of go more far and wide for inspiration.”
The result is a movie filled with fascinating alien monsters that feel familiar enough to trigger recognition but strange enough to resist being neatly categorized.
The creatures in Hope might prove fearsome (another transforms from a humanoid to a feral beast with snapping teeth in seconds), but that didn’t make Na want to amplify the brutality. His films are notorious for their violence, often depicted in a range of ways, from messy and desperate to intensely human. While Hope’s extensive visual effects allowed for a far more grotesque form of violence, Na actually found himself pulling back on the gore.
“At the end stages of post-production, the VFX supervisor would show me some cuts that were incredibly violent,” he says. “It was almost disgusting to look at. I asked them specifically to tone it down a little bit. I feel like they really played it up because they had seen my previous films.”
Instead, Hong-jin wanted to create the same kind of violent impact without simply covering the screen in blood.
“For Hope itself, I really wanted to tone down a little bit of the red in the film, and to be able to create impact through exaggeration and exclusion, not necessarily through just a complete bloodbath.”
Returning to Familiar Ground
Pulling back on the gore doesn’t mean Na has abandoned the instincts that made his earlier thrillers so effective. If anything, Hope takes those same instincts — physical violence, escalating danger, and ordinary people trapped in extraordinary circumstances — and pushes them into a completely different kind of movie. Even with aliens running through the woods and cars racing through the countryside, Na remains fascinated by what happens when people are given nowhere to run.
This fascination starts with his settings. Na has repeatedly relied upon isolated Korean communities as pressure cookers, and Hope continues that tradition. His approach to the fictional Hope Harbor wasn’t simply about finding somewhere visually striking for the monsters to run around in. The town needed to feel like a real place before everything went horribly wrong.
I personally love really small villages in Korea.
“I personally love really small villages in Korea,” Na says. “I’m not particularly interested in Korean cities because I don’t find them to be particularly unique.”
The Wailing found its nightmare in Gokseong, a rural town in South Jeolla Province that Na knows well, as it was his grandmother’s hometown. For Hope, the director and his team scoured Korea for the perfect location, eventually settling on Namchang-ri, a small coastal village in Haenam County. The production transformed the real town into the fictional Hope Harbor, redressing its old bus terminal as the local police station and turning its streets, shops, and coastline into the movie’s isolated setting. The two locations are also surprisingly close. Gokseong and Namchang-ri are only about a two-hour drive from one another.
The geographical connection between the two films is hard to ignore, but Na wasn’t interested in simply returning to the world of The Wailing. The movies may share a fascination with isolated communities and ordinary people confronted by things they can’t explain, yet they are looking at those ideas from almost opposite emotional directions.
“I would say the themes of The Wailing and Hope here are quite different,” Na says. “The Wailing really deals with sort of the bottomless pit of despair and misfortune and what that can bring to humanity.”
Like the title itself, the characters have a genuine sense of hope.
In The Wailing, misfortune becomes an unstoppable force. Its characters spend much of the movie trying to understand something that may be completely beyond their comprehension. Hope begins with a similar sense of the unknown, but Na wanted to build his new movie around a very different idea.
“Like the title itself, the characters have a genuine sense of hope,” Na says. “I wanted to explore the idea that once a desire comes true, the hope itself disappears. I really wanted to create that sense of feeling, because the feeling of hope is going to actually fail for everyone by the end. Despite that, people are still really latching onto that feeling.”
A Thriller at Heart
For all the ways Hope expands Na’s filmmaking, the director doesn’t view the movie as some radical break from his career. Instead, this CGI spectacle full of killer aliens and maximalist action set pieces may just be a detour before he returns to the genre he knows best — on one condition.
“Thrillers are what I’ve always done, and it’s the genre I love the most,” Na says. “I do think I’ll continue to make thrillers when there hasn’t been a good thriller out in theaters in a while. I really want to make the type of thriller movie that I want to watch. So that kind of gives me motivation to start writing again.”
It definitely highlights a lot of negative aspects of humanity.
Then again, maybe Hope is just another Na Hong-jin thriller in disguise. The director didn’t suddenly decide to leave his cinematic roots behind for a Hollywood-style alien blockbuster. He’s taken the things he has always loved about the genre — escalation, fear, violence, strange characters, impossible situations — and given them a much bigger playground.
The same instinct seems to run through the entire movie. Na has made a much bigger film, but he hasn’t abandoned the details that made his earlier thrillers so effective. He still wants violence to feel physical. He still wants isolated communities to feel specific. He still wants the audience to be trapped alongside his characters, only this time he’s done it in a way that feels utterly relentless. Hope is a rare kind of movie that just keeps going, in all the best ways.
All of that momentum eventually leads Hope somewhere darker than its sci-fi spectacle might suggest. The monsters may be the immediate threat, but Na is still more interested in the people reacting to them. Push the villagers far enough, and the movie starts exposing some very ugly parts of human nature.
“By the end of the film, it definitely highlights a lot of negative aspects of humanity,” Na says. “It also tells the audience that we shouldn’t be like this. Hopefully, the audience leaves with the sense that they shouldn’t act like the villagers do necessarily.”
For a filmmaker who’s spent nearly two decades putting characters through increasingly horrific situations, Hope feels like the perfect escalation of everything Na already does so well. The stakes might all be bigger, but the filmmaker at the center of it hasn’t changed nearly as much as the scale suggests. He’s still obsessed with putting ordinary people in nightmare scenarios and watching them unravel. Yet, for a director infamous for leaving viewers emotionally drained, his ultimate goal for all this relentless momentum is surprisingly simple.
“I hope that they think, ‘That was really exciting, that was really cool,’ as they leave the theater.”
![12th Sep: Contraband (2012), 1hr 49m [R] – Streaming Again (6.25/10)](https://occ-0-953-1001.1.nflxso.net/dnm/api/v6/0Qzqdxw-HG1AiOKLWWPsFOUDA2E/AAAABdigj2O6_nLFIR0Un3mrZ2Zm8PDHAkX_7EDnVcX9nHEGg1_p8wuHzF4naP-57_Dt6CVqlvW0WKhd7Nc5ETAb0O7XailgOpY5mjlO.jpg?r=0b8 "12th Sep: Contraband (2012), 1hr 49m [R] – Streaming Again (6.25/10)")
