Hae Sul Said It Was a Tiger: What Na Hong-Jin’s “HOPE” Refuses to Show

A remote village close to the DMZ (Demilitarised Zone), unregistered rifles, a lone police officer and a crime scene with a mutilated cow carcass left in the middle of the road, with its flesh marked with deep gashes suggesting a predator beyond ordinary imagination is the first scene the audience sees. That’s how the director Na Hong-Jin (known for The Wailing) opens the movie.

A remarkable contrast is between this remote village’s ordinary lives and the ominous present that it is now riddled with – an animal is mauled but not eaten. It is an unsettling disruption to the village’s mundane life. Secondly, who killed it? Can’t be a tiger or a bear because an average claw isn’t this huge so definitely something else. It is this restrained suspense and a disturbing sense of anticipation that piques the audience’s interest.

Now, most people expect to be let in, on the knowledge of “WHO IS IT?” The director denies it this time. We don’t know who it is that ruffled up a small tranquil village that is insanely on the edge of the heavily militarised Korean border, with cramped houses, narrow alleyways and winding roads. We are seeing the entire scene unfold before us through the eyes of a police officer: Beom Seok; what he investigates, we do. What he sees, we see, and what he suspects, we do; and so far, he knows it CANNOT be a tiger. A tiger does not wreak havoc on an entire village, doesn’t gut a building and cause a hole the size of a giant in the cement wall, or hurls vehicles across streets. Smoke billows in the distance, a gunfire punctuates the silence and a deep guttural bellow is heard over the houses and now we know it too, IT IS NOT A TIGER.

Movie poster. Courtesy of NEON Entertainment

What do we know so far? The time is the late 20th century, remote villages don’t have mobile phones yet, they are relying mostly on radios and wall phones, and there is spy infiltration along the border between North & South Korea (poster saying, ‘protect the nation from infiltration’). Covert intelligence operations mark the late 1900s in the history of North and South Korea along the 38th parallel. The 1990s and early 2000s saw the most espionage activity between the two countries. Hence, we get to see multiple signs on the fences saying “Stop Spies” – A technique called “foreshadowing” where something is hinted at, before it formally is introduced in the story. The village has been trained to fear an intruder from across the border, someone who looks like them but doesn’t belong. So when something tears through it, the fear is already there, waiting; only the intruder has changed. We, therefore, can guess that even the unnamed monster rampaging across the village may not be from this area or this world at all.

Another humorous consistency in the film is that all the stories are attributed to a man named “Hae Sul” and the whole village sincerely believes whatever he says.

Who is it?

It is a tiger.

Why? Because Hae Sul said it.

So, everyone believes it. If he says it, then it must be true.

We’re 40 minutes into the movie; did we see who it is? No, but everyone else has, the guy hiding under the bridge, the donkey that we saw running away, the random villagers in a truck with quite a collection of rifles have, and where did they even get the guns?? Apparently, no one knows! We are kept blind still, and the story turns inexplicable from a mundane. The movie builds tension through investigation, anticipation and imagination. 50 minutes into the movie and we’re still watching it, sitting on the edge of our seats, because every frame, angle, scene, almost gives the identity away and yet it doesn’t. The first half of the movie has the horror signs of a looming threat, but the nature of that threat becomes clear only in the latter half of the movie and THAT makes it a good thriller.

Do we get to see who is it? Yes, around the 51st minute into the movie and from there onwards is a melee of chaos that stays on long till the last minute. It’s a chase, it’s an adrenaline rush, it’s anger towards the creature, but wait, the creature IS intelligent. How do we know? Oh, we do, quite clearly.

Still from Hope (2026), dir. Na Hong-jin. © Plus M Entertainment / NEON”.

Jung Ho-Yeon (Squid Game) is a police officer alongside Beom Seok and she delivers a befitting end to the first creature. Now, the entire village is scooped up in a public hospital, and guess who she is attending to? Hae Sul – who everyone believes. And Hae Sul has a story to tell! How he saw more than one in the forest! Why was he in the forest??? You will know, and he will make sure you remember the details too. BUT do we believe him?? Oh yes, we do!

Well, police officer’s cousin Seung Ki is already out with the search party in the jungle thinking they are chasing a tiger. OHH how they were proven wrong. Here, is the movie’s reversal point too, an extra-terrestrial tragedy, an intelligent species stuck in our world, surviving in the forest, in search for a child named Kali, struck and taken by a villager hoping to sell him. It’s a revelation that reframes the violence.

Without a spoiler, the final stretch of the movie escalates into a spectacular chase between the creatures and humans, on front, Seung Ki and the trio – Police officer, that villager who caused it all, our female protagonist – and that random villager who was hiding under the bridge earlier. It’s a spectacle of frantic pursuit, with inexplicable destruction. Yet beneath the spectacle lies a more unsettling possibility: that the creature terrorising the village is not simply an embodiment of evil, but a being responding to loss. The film’s most effective horror comes from what it withholds. The opening makes the audience experience the destruction before understanding its causes; the later sections attempt to explain that destruction through an elaborate alien mythology.

Official poster for Hope (2026), dir. Na Hong-jin. © NEON. Image via IMP Awards.

Whether that expansion deepens the mystery or diminishes it is one of the film’s most interesting points of contention. Critics are divided but many including IndieWire and Variety, felt the film loses its momentum after the creature is revealed. Do I believe this perspective? YES, the pace slackens and because the creatures are intelligent and have a language and when a creature comprehends & articulates with a language, they CANNOT be hated blindly, they need to be UNDERSTOOD first.

Hope is not a flawless film. The second half trades its quiet dread for noise, and the creatures are not always as convincing as the fear they leave behind. But for fifty minutes, Na Hong-jin makes us believe in something we cannot see, and that is rarer than any monster. Is it worth watching? YES, if only to sit in that village and wonder, along with everyone else, whether Hae Sul was right.