Hope

Toronto International Film Festival: HOPE 🌲 호프 (2026)

For three hours, I was being chased by aliens in Korea while sitting in a theatre in Canada, and AH SHIBA! was it f*cking awesome.

Director Na Hong-jin, best known for the critically acclaimed horror film The Wailing (2016), drops us into a rural Korean town that suddenly finds itself caught in a string of increasingly violent attacks against animals.

What starts as an over-his-head cop investigating a series of bizarre occurrences quickly spirals into a full-blown nightmare, as an unknown entity turns these gun-toting small-town hunters into the hunted.

HOPE was, without question, my favourite moviegoing experience of 2026. You’d be doing yourself a serious disservice by not seeing this on the biggest screen possible. This gave me the exact same feeling I had the first time I watched Train to Busan (2016) and A Quiet Place (2018): that feeling where you become so completely locked into a wickedly tense game of cat and mouse that the rest of the world disappears. Nothing matters except these people making it out alive.

The first hour and a half of this movie is survival-thriller filmmaking at its absolute best. It’s a masterclass in tension, letting the screams of terror echo throughout this town while keeping the actual source of that terror just out of reach. And normally, these kinds of movies rely on impairing your senses with a one-two punch of darkness and untraceable noises, but HOPE does something even more unnerving: it sets this story in broad daylight.
You can see everything, you can search everywhere, and you still can’t find the thing hunting you, yet the loud gunshots ringing is like a ticking time bomb of the imminent death that may be awaiting you. 


Does this movie have flaws? Absolutely. But this is one of those rare times where I genuinely did not care. Even when the meaning behind everything happening felt a little... unsure of itself, or some of the CGI choices veered into “Who approved this?” territory, I was still completely locked in.

A lot of people will also be interested in seeing Squid Game alum Jung Ho-yeon take on her first major role post-Squid Game. After the absolutely insane fanfare surrounding her and her character, I’ve always wondered why it felt like she disappeared from the spotlight a little. I was worried they’d throw her into an acclaimed director’s movie as a recognizable name, place her front and centre on the poster, and use her as a pretty face. Nope. Not even close. She kicks all the ass, and even when the ass is literally impossible to kick, she’s still gonna lace up her boots and let them know she’s backing down to no one.

If she’s the backbone of the film, Hwang Jung-min is the beating heart.

He brings exactly the kind of frantic, desperate energy this movie needs, and watching him try to survive this absolute nightmare was an absolute treat.

This is a head-spinning, full-throttle, blood-soaked kills-and-thrills joyride that was the best kind of adrenaline rush, and by the time it ended, I was already wishing I could experience it all over again.

One of the biggest surprises for me was how effortlessly this movie balances all that blood-splattering chaos with genuinely hilarious comedic moments.
The comedy never feels like it’s stepping on the tension, either. If anything, it makes the whole experience even more chaotic because you can go from laughing your ass off to wondering who the hell is going to survive the next five minutes.

Side note: Take a shot every time someone says “Ah, Shiba!” and you’ll be absolutely obliterated 10 minutes into the movie. 

Now, let’s talk about the weirdest part of this entire movie: the aliens.

In the first part of the movie, they work so well as this unseen presence, like a terrifying shadow lurking somewhere outside the frame. We experience the hunt from the cop’s point of view, and not letting him see one until an hour into the film makes the reveal that much more impactful because, by that point, you need to see it as badly as he does. Then the movie starts peeling back the curtain and giving us more of their history, hierarchy, technology, and overall mythology, and suddenly I found myself thinking: Wait... why are we doing all this?

It felt like an entire alien mythology had been stapled onto a movie that was otherwise perfectly happy being a brutal survival thriller. There’s something so much scarier about not fully understanding what’s hunting you. The less you know, the more your brain fills in the gaps, and HOPE is at its best when it lets that fear breathe. Even the design of the aliens was such a stark contrast compared to the world we felt like we had existed in up to that point. They either looked like giants from Attack on Titan or Star Wars Kaminoans. (They actually looked pretty cool.)

I say all that while still having had an absolute blast watching this movie. It’s everything I wish Disclosure (or what I like to call Disappoint) Day would’ve been.

There’s a chance this gets a sequel, with its reverse-Avatar-type ending. Personally, I HOPE this ends up being a one-of-one. I actually love the idea of this ending ambiguously, leaving us to sit with what the hell we just watched and interpret this world, and these aliens—for ourselves. Not everything needs to be explained. Sometimes the unanswered questions are what stick with you.

Either way, I said it before, and I’m going to say it again: watch this in theatres, on the biggest screen possible, because HOPE is the kind of movie that deserves to be experienced at full volume, with a packed theatre, an enormous screen, and absolutely no distractions.

Now, go get chased by some aliens. 

Enjoy!

7.8/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 2hr36mins

Where: Now Playing In Theatres

The Richmond Reviewer Hope Review - September 9th, 2026.