Ever since Alien, otherworldly beings have been used as the perfect strange enemy in creature features. Between The Thing, Annihilation, and Cloverfield, alien invasions and fights for survival are all over film history. But with that popularity comes an expectation, and now these movies risk being a little repetitive.
At the Cannes Film Festival, a new creature feature from a proven Korean filmmaker is dividing critics — and now fans have the opportunity to get a sense for things themselves with a brand-new trailer. Check out the teaser trailer for the movie below:
Hope is the latest movie from Korean filmmaker Na Hong-jin, who previously directed The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, and The Wailing. According to Deadline, the synopsis for the movie is as follows: “In Hope Harbor, a remote village near the Demilitarized Zone, police outpost chief Bum-seok receives word from locals that a tiger has appeared. As the village erupts into panic, Bum-seok is forced to confront a reality beyond belief.”
While we only have the teaser trailer, the movie has already screened at Cannes, so we have reactions from critics. Apparently, the first hour of this 2-hour-and-40-minute-long movie is one long set piece following the chase of the creature at the center of the movie. While it evoked comparisons to Alien, Predator, and even Attack on Titan, some were critical of the shoddy CGI once the creature actually showed up, with IndieWire’s David Ehrlich even comparing it to The Mummy Returns, one of the most infamous examples of bad CGI that takes you out of the story.
Hope’s Letterboxd rankings look about as scattered as they can be, so there’s no way to tell how this will hit after it’s distributed by NEON, which acquired U.S. distribution rights before it even premiered. Maybe this will be the next big sci-fi horror creature feature, standing alongside cinematic classics, or maybe this flaw will completely ruin any semblance of suspension of disbelief.
But perhaps there’s a logical explanation to this that could solve everything: a simple production timeline crunch. Director Na Hong-jin told Deadline that what was shown at Cannes wasn’t a final product. “I was thinking I should have more applauses…I need to work on it harder,” he said. “To be honest with you I didn’t have enough time to finish this film for Cannes. There’s still work to do. I was working on the sound just the day before traveling here.”
With that in mind, it’s very possible we could see this film go through another round of post-production that could fix all the issues critics had. But even as it is, there were plenty of critics who were lauding it as the future of the genre — it can only get better from here.
