Na Hong-jin’s Hope, a sci-fi action film built around an alien invasion of a remote South Korean harbour village, has become the fastest-grossing film in South Korean history, selling 2.6 million tickets within five days of its re-edited release, according to IndieWire. Built on a budget reported to be closing in on 100 billion won (US$74.3 million), the Na Hong-jin Hope alien invasion epic is already one of the most expensive Korean films ever produced, as South China Morning Post reported.
Na Hong-jin’s Hope: alien invasion on a country scale
The film is set in Hope Harbour, a small, isolated fishing community in Haenam, the southernmost point of mainland Korea. Na, the director behind The Wailing and The Chaser, deliberately chose a village over a city. Speaking to GQ, he explained his reasoning plainly: ‘If this [town] looks simple, then the contrast is even more stark. I wanted to start off the story as a conflict between a small group of people and a small group of aliens, and then as it expands into a bigger conflict.’
The film conceals its extraterrestrials entirely for the first 50 minutes, allowing tension to build through wreckage, livestock carcasses, distant gunshots and a bicycle hurled at a pursuing officer. Na described a deliberate sense of encroachment: ‘I used everything except for the imagery of the alien. You can also see by the level of destruction of the buildings that we’re getting closer to the culprit behind everything.’
Hope Harbour itself was constructed across two actual villages in Haenam, with residents continuing to live inside their homes while production used the facades. Na noted that the production design team hid details for attentive viewers throughout: inside a real estate office with a large hole punched through its wall, a map shows markings in the alien’s own script, bloodstains pointing towards locations where villagers stored their jangdokdae, the traditional Korean pots used to ferment kimchi and soy sauce.
Three chases, six months of training and the Na Hong-jin alien invasion at full throttle
The film’s first hour contains three vehicle sequences, and Na was insistent that each carry a different sonic identity. The first, a police car crash, uses what he calls traditional car-chase sound design. The second, a truck packed with older villagers fleeing the village, prioritises unsettling creaks amplified well beyond realistic scale, ‘so much bigger than you would see in traditional films,’ he said. The third, the sequence that closes the hour, is the film’s centrepiece: Sung-ae (Hoyeon) pursuing the alien through narrow alleys in a police car, executing 90-degree drifts without decelerating.
To film it safely and without cutting away, Hoyeon undertook six months of driving training before a single frame of that sequence was shot. Na was clear that no CG was used for any of the three chases: everything was filmed in-camera. ‘Maybe that’s why you found it to be very raw,’ he told GQ.
Sung-ae’s entrance into the film, arriving at the 50-minute mark armed with a large rifle, prompted applause at the Cannes premiere. Na said he held the character back deliberately: ‘I wanted to delay Sung-ae’s entrance as much as I could. I wanted it to be the most dramatic, and I wanted her to enter the scene when it’s at the peak, when everyone is in danger.’
Beneath the propulsive action, the film carries a political layer Na developed from real-world anxieties. He began writing the script during a period of heightened tension around North Korea and rising conflict in multiple regions, and the small harbour’s proximity to the border is not incidental. ‘I really wanted to talk about violence and war between different groups and different countries,’ he said. The aliens are, eventually, revealed to be something closer to refugees than invaders, and Na described designing the film so that viewers must consciously choose which side to take. ‘This movie lets you know what kind of person you are because you get to choose.’
With the re-edited version of Hope now confirmed as South Korea’s fastest-selling film ever, that question is being posed to a very large audience indeed.
