Na Hong-jin, the director whose films Korea cannot stop arguing about

Na Hong-jin

Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 20, 1974 Seoul, South Korea
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	The Chaser, The Wailing, The Yellow Sea
Awards	2 Grand Bell Award · 2 Baeksang Award · Blue Dragon Award · Asian Film

On Naver’s ticket-verified ratings, more than half the people who saw Hope gave Na Hong-jin’s alien film a nine or a ten, and almost a quarter gave it a one or a two. That split is the most consistent thing about the South Korean director: he makes enormous, punishing genre films that pull in mass audiences and then refuse to tell those audiences what they have just watched. Bong Joon-ho and Lee Chang-dong spoke up for the film. A good share of ticket buyers complained that the aliens arrive with no explanation and leave with the story unfinished, close to three hours later.

The city on his birth certificate is Seoul, but the landscape that runs through his work lies further south. Na spent long stretches of his childhood in Gokseong, a rural county in South Jeolla and his grandmother’s hometown, trailing after her churchgoing Catholic friends and holding the priests’ hands. Decades later he gave the town’s name to The Wailing, whose Korean title is simply Gokseong, and filled it with priests, shamans and a stranger nobody can place.

He did not take the straight road into cinema. Na, born in the summer of 1974, studied crafts at Hanyang University and worked in advertising before enrolling at the Korea National University of Arts. The short films won quickly. A Perfect Red Snapper Dish took the top prize in the extreme-genre section of the Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival, and Sweat brought him the Grand Bell Award for best short film director plus a jury prize at Bucheon.

The Chaser, his first feature, behaved like the work of a veteran. Kim Yoon-seok plays a disgraced detective turned pimp hunting the man who is making his women disappear; Ha Jung-woo plays the killer, a character drawn from the real serial murderer Yoo Young-chul. The audience knows who the killer is almost from the start, and the police are worse than useless, so the thriller turns into a long, furious quarrel with institutions. It sold more than five million tickets in Korea in 2008, screened at Cannes as a midnight selection and won the Grand Bell Awards for best film and best director. Warner Bros. paid a million dollars for remake rights and the remake never happened.

The Yellow Sea reunited the two actors and swapped their positions. Ha became the hunted man, a debt-ridden taxi driver from the ethnic Korean community of Yanbian, in China, who crosses to South Korea to carry out a contract killing; Kim became the fixer sent after him. 20th Century Fox put money into the production, a first for a Korean film, and it played in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2011. It also handed critics their first real complaint. Reviewers found the second film exhausting; Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian that it could have lost 30 minutes. It sold about 2.1 million tickets, well under its predecessor.

Then he went quiet for six years. The Wailing, when it came in 2016, was the film that defined him abroad. Kwak Do-won plays a village policeman trying to save his possessed daughter, while a Japanese stranger played by Jun Kunimura, a shaman played by Hwang Jung-min and a woman in white played by Chun Woo-hee each claim to know what is killing the neighbours. Na set Catholic iconography against Korean shamanic ritual for 156 minutes and declined to settle which side was lying. Close to seven million Koreans bought tickets. The film premiered out of competition at Cannes, and Na was named best director at the Blue Dragon Film Awards and the Asian Film Awards.

The flattering reading of his career is a steady climb. The less flattering one is that he has never fixed the problem critics first named on The Yellow Sea. His films run long, withhold explanation and end on a jolt instead of a resolution, and a large part of the audience takes that as contempt rather than ambition. The Wailing drew exactly the complaints that Hope would draw a decade later, and the arguments became part of the draw. Na has never apologised for the withholding. Asked about the ten years between those two films, he answered: “It was the time it took to become the filmmaker and make the film.”

In between, he wrote and produced for someone else. The Medium, directed by the Thai filmmaker Banjong Pisanthanakun and shot as a mock documentary in Thailand’s Isan region, began as an idea for a story about the shaman Hwang Jung-min had played in The Wailing. By the time it was released in 2021, Na was insisting the two films had no relation. It won the top prize at Bucheon and became Thailand’s submission to the Oscars. In 2025 the Busan International Film Festival asked him to preside over the jury of its first-ever competition section.

Hope is the film that swallowed most of the decade. It began, he has said, with a single image that came to him while he was eating in a restaurant, and it grew into the most expensive production in South Korean history, at around 46 million dollars. Hwang Jung-min returns to Na’s world as the police chief of Hope Harbor, a village near the Demilitarized Zone, with Zo In-sung and Hoyeon beside him. Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton play the aliens, their faces buried under motion-capture designs. Shooting ran through 2023, partly in Romania’s Retezat Mountains, and post-production took nearly three more years, much of it on creatures that, in Na’s words, no Korean effects team had ever built to that level.

The film premiered in competition at Cannes on May 17, 2026, the first Korean title to compete for the Palme d’Or since Decision to Leave, and went home without a prize. Its Korean release on July 15 produced the biggest opening of the year, 1.5 million admissions in the first weekend, before word of mouth split and the run settled at around 4.55 million. Neon opened it in North America on September 9, where it took 3.2 million dollars in its first weekend and met critics far warmer than Korean audiences had been.

Na is not going straight back to Hope Harbor. He told The Playlist in September that his next project is “a darker, bloodier movie that I’ve already half-written.” The sequel to Hope is written too, set at night and told from the aliens’ side, and Hoyeon has said he imagines the story across three films. Whether the second and third get made depends on financing, and after 4.55 million admissions at home, money is the one argument Na cannot win by withholding the answer.