Na Hong-jin's new film 'Hope', reportedly the most expensive Korean movie ever made, has arrived with the weight of expectation that only a record-breaking production can carry. In a new review, critic Beatrice Loayza approaches the film with wariness, asking what its idea of hope actually amounts to when it is delivered through the machinery of the mega-budget monster movie. The film's opening hour follows Bum-seok, played by Hwang Jung-min, a dopey police chief who takes up the case after hunters discover a mangled cow carcass in the middle of a country road. With gliding wide-screen camerawork, the director moves through wrecked farmhouses and village streets littered with mutilated corpses and debris, mounting an absurdity that keeps asking, in effect, what could possibly have done this. An elder villager, armed with a comically ineffectual bow and arrow, describes the unseen creature as resembling a mush of peas and beans, while its bodily ooze clings to its victims. The review reads the premise — aliens with suspiciously Western facial features invading a small Korean hamlet — as a neatly legible metaphor for waging war against cultural encroachment, set against recent global efforts in cinema to push back against American dominance of the theatrical arena. Yet the film's humour and choreographed bravura, Loayza suggests, sit uneasily beside the scale of its spectacle, and the escalating calamity quickly outruns the bumbling hero's ability to matter within it. What remains is a creature feature whose ambitions outpace its coherence. The review grants the director's comic sense and technical command while questioning whether the film's central emotion, hope, survives the onslaught of its own set pieces — and whether a production of this size can still say anything precise about the cultural pressures it claims to address.