“Hope,” the sci-fi actioner creature feature from “The Wailing” director Na Hong-jin, jolted the 2026 Cannes Film Festival after its premiere, providing some nonstop and unexpected thrills. But there may be more where that came from, as Na revealed during a press conference that he has a larger world in mind and has already written a sequel to the epic sci-fi creature feature that finds inhabitants of a small South Korean village battling an alien invasion.
Our very own Chase Hutchinson raved, “It’s a glorious genre romp that contains more significant moments in its opening act than most do in their entire runtime.”
Na and the cast, Hwang Jeong-min, Jo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell gathered together on Monday for a press conference where they broke down Na’s madcap vision.
“I wanted it to be a primitive film, not a contemporary film … like a film you might have seen a long, long time ago,” Na shared. “I needed top-quality actors because there were going to be a lot of very dangerous action sequences. I managed to trick them into joining.”
The cast had nothing but praise for Na’s direction and vision as a leader on set. “To create something new, you have to have a lot of courage,” Zo said. “The idea was to create new images.”
“You just don’t know what’s going to come next,” said Fassbender, articulating the joy of working with him. “He’s mixing genres … that feeling of the unexpected is quite rare in the cinematic experience.”
Vikander recounted her connection to Na, sharing that her first international film festival was the Busan International Film Festival at the age of 21. “I fell in love with Asian cinema,” over those few days, she said. She saw “Chaser,” “The Yellow Sea,” and “The Wailing” and was “amazed and blown away.”
She and another actor had a script she was looking at and had hoped Na would develop it. “He came on board, and we developed for a bit, then in a very gentle manner, he came back and said he has this very big, sci-fi adventure, and it looks like I’ll be getting some money to do it.” A couple years later, he reached out to Vikander and said, “I have some alien characters.”
As for what drew the English-speaking cast to the film, Fassbender quipped of his wife, “Alicia told me to do it,” with Russell facetiously concurring. Russell then added, “The dream is being able to work in a different country and work on foreign-to-me language films and to work with an auteur. When the call came, you made me laugh the entire time I talked with you, which made me think that [making this film] would be a very fun ride. It would be great to do more Korean films and speak some Korean.”
Indeed, the film puts its human actors, the central trio played by Korean legend Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, and Jung Ho-yeon, through the physical wringer. Zo, who plays a local hunter, Sung-ki, whose character arc garnered the most laughs throughout the film, had a knee operation, and at the beginning of his contract, he shared that it would be difficult for him to run through the film. “Then of course he ran throughout the film,” Na said, laughing.
Hoyeon likewise spoke about the fact that since the camera was focused on the actors’ faces, she had to be intentional about her expressions for the film’s most intense sequences. Hwang, who does his own fair share of Tom Cruise-style running in the film, spoke about the unique approach he took to those sequences, “If a person was running after me, I’d run differently,” he shared. Aliens, he denoted, are a whole different story.
Although the project is at a gargantuan 160 minutes, without giving too much away, it’s clear there’s a larger world Na has in mind and more story he wants to tell.
“When you watch the film, you can readily imagine a sequel. There’s a script that’s already been written, and if I have an opportunity, I’d love to make a sequel if possible,” Na shared, adding, “We’ll see how the baton will change hands,” hinting perhaps that the first film, where the aliens didn’t get much development, may get center stage in the follow-up.
As thrilling as the movie was, there was a lot under the surface of its thrills. Fassbender, in the earlier part of the conference, spoke about the parallels between the human and alien characters.
“[The aliens and humans] want the same thing, which is protecting their young.” Furthermore, Na shared, “The film really deals with problems of violence, contemporary phenomena, and why all these phenomena exist and continue to exist. Maybe there’s a kind of faith, religious or otherwise, that will help us.”
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