The wailing

KPOP DEMON HUNTERS

2025

Directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans

Written by Danya Jiminez, Hannah McMegan, Maggie Kang, and Chris Appelhans

Spoilers: moderate

So, I would have to concede that my reaction when I heard about KPop Demon Hunters for the first time, not very long ago, was that it was a dim prospect; honestly, my very initial assumption was that it was a branding opportunity for an actual K-pop band, and I gave up on new music years before I even got old (and hence I was able to be surprised that KPop Demon Hunters' particular answer to the question of "so what the hell is this 'K-pop,' anyway?" turned out to be, to my ears, "what if numetal had happened to tecnho instead," though I'm obviously not any kind of music critic).  But even becoming apprised of what the movie actually was, it wasn't designed to stoke much enthusiasm in me: a movie about K-pop combined with demon hunting, and therefore looking like just the most boardroom-calculated project imaginable, from its blunt, ugly, and arguably-misspelled title on down; even moreso, given the aesthetic parameters of the project were "anime! but Spider-Versed!", which is at least a reasonable extension for Sony Pictures Imageworks' evolving house style; but while that Spider-Verse style sure is hot these days, Sony's been working along similar lines for years, and the last time it did outside of a Spider-Verse movie it was called The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which was extremely underwhelming; oh, and then it was released on Netflix, and the phrase "Netflix movie" has just about reached the same currency as "kleenex" or "xerox" as the genericized term for content that has no artistic justification for existing, a track record that's roughly as dreary with their animated originals (such as, for instance, The Mitchells vs. the Machines) as everything else.  Yet it became nothing less than the stay-at-home crowd's big deal of the summer—a sufficiently big deal to prompt Netflix to release it theaters this past weekend, where it became the no. 1 movie in America, which means people loved it so much it actually got a significant number of them to leave their couches when they didn't even have to—and while you should never trust a cartoon adult, if you have an interest in animation, then at some point or another you have to recognize what's achieved importance in the medium.  KPop Demon Hunters has undeniably done so; and it didn't hurt that even people I do respect were willing to grant that it was decent; and guess what, I'd go so far as to say it's good.

The actual backstory of KPop Demon Hunters, anyway, has a more personalized origin than I'd have expected, being the brainchild of Maggie Kang, presently making her co-directorial debut (she's paired here with Chris Appelhans), who wanted to do something Korean, musical, and fantastic, and, well, is that title not denotative?   In essence, it's what Sinners (which Kang and Applehans and their co-writers obviously wouldn't have known about) would've been like if it were, also, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (which Kang and Appelhans very, very, very clearly know about), and what its fantasy supposes is that traditional music had a real, physical purpose that still needed to be served even as those traditions collapsed***, and thus the woman exorcists who dispelled the demons who feast on human souls with a combination of music and superhuman martial arts were obliged to begin infiltrating the capitalistic music industry that grew up in Korea (amidst Japanese imperialism I guess) in the 1920s, and came into its own the 1960s.  We see all this in a narrated whirlwind tribute to Korean music of the 20th century that I really wish were longer; but the upshot is that these "Hunters" were present at the birth of true, hyphenated, abbreviated K-pop in the 1990s, and, today, a new generation has taken over that sacred duty.  This is Huntr/x (or "Huntrix," and the Netflix subtitles do not bother committing to the bit, which is just as well), a girl group trio comprising Rumi (Arden Cho with singer Ejae providing the musical performances), Mira (May Hong, sung by Audrey Nuna), and Zoey (Ji-young Yoo, sung by Rei Ami).  Come 2025, they're the biggest thing in K-pop—a circumstance that I'm sure has historically always lasted a full generation, but let's keep our objections to ourselves for now—and, in between brawls with emergent demons, the three have come very close to weaving a nation- or possibly globe-spanning protection spell out of their music, powered by the sense of community their songs have engendered and drawn from the energy of their rabid fandom, which is good, because they are bone tired, and need the proverbial vacation, so that their reaction to getting Lynyrd Skynyrded by a bunch of demons posing as flight staff on their jet (I think this might really be an intentional joke about bands dying in airplanes, which is conceptually quite funny) is more like "oh, this shit again."

In the underworld, the king of the demons, Gwi-ma (legitimate "I've seen this guy's movies" Korean cinema star, Lee Byung-hun), is likewise exhausted.  But now a certain charismatic underling, Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop, sung by Andrew Choi), once a man, comes to him with a plan: what if Huntr/x weren't the biggest thing in K-pop?  What if he led a boy band of fellow demons to take their crown?  And so does Gwi-ma send him to Earth, to front the Saja Boys, which nobody seems to realize is a hilariously dark name for a boy band to take—imagine if "*NSYNC" were called "*NDEATH"—who steal Huntr/x's limelight, rising to the top of the charts and putting giant holes in the spirit net they'd labored so long to weave so that, soon enough, the demons are coming right through to feed.  Worse, it so happens that Rumi has a secret that Jinu discovers—Rumi is a demon herself, or at least half, born of a demonic father, yet drafted anyway into the Hunters' anti-demon war, with the proviso that the "patterns" (a word uttered frequently enough to make one ask "what the fuck was wrong with the word 'marks'?") on her arms identifying her as such must always be covered.  But Jinu has his own unhappy past, and he sees in Rumi's situation the possibility of an alternative to his miserable existence, and curiosity gets the better of him, though when it comes down to it, aren't they sworn enemies?

This goes substantially how you'd expect—they are extremely aware of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—though it's not without some surprises, and while I don't think I'd like to go too far with it, this has got to be in some kind of conversation with the hell-on-earth, even-makes-America-look-healthy gender war currently being waged in South Korea, right?  Given, anyway, that the two genders in the movie are effectively "female" and "demon."  (The one halfway-salient exception is Huntr/x's manager, Bobby; and I don't know what kind of subverting-your-expectations game you're playing, Kang and Appelhans, but who casts Ken Jeong in a movie about demons and then has Ken Jeong anonymously play a nice guy with eight lines?  Perhaps the role was chang'ed.)  Still, the main thing is an adversarial romance with twists and turns, and the power of love and possibility of redemption each tossed into a cage match with the possibility of betrayal; KPop Demon Hunters has some exquisite fundamentals.

But, having delayed it, this is the part where I just start listing objections, and some are bigger and some smaller, and I don't know whether the one that'll occur to you the earliest is big or small, but in keeping with that "social commentary metaphor" thing, it's obviously doing something with the whole K-pop industrial complex—"groomed from young adulthood by unforgiving and conformist institutions" sounds familiar, because it's the one single thing everybody knows about K-pop, that it's extremely manufactured, and that striving towards idoldom fucking sucks—but Huntr/x itself is, like, just any regular band, like they met in Rumi's garage.  They write all their own songs, for God's sake.  But then, the movie is dangerously overloading itself with metaphor anyway: it's a slight spoiler, but it probably makes the movie better to know it's not as chickenshit as it initially appears, so let's clarify that Jinu is significantly misrepresenting the scope of his past sin that turned him into a demon; but it clearly doesn't know what to do with Rumi's own "past sin"—which was, recall, "being conceived"—to the extent that the movie never even evinces any firm idea what the relationship that generated her even looked like, since Rumi's tutelage was accomplished not by her human mother but by the ex-Hunter Celine (Yunjin Kim), who taught her to conceal, and if she must feel, to do so about other things.  (And if we want to just outright nitpick: so, she's a world-famous pop star who never uncovers her arms, huh, and how long does that last before she's forced to prove she's not a devoted cutter?  Why do the demon marks reaching her throat make her a bad singer, but Jinu sings beautifully?  Where does Ozzy Osbourne fit into this cosmology?)  Whatever else, "miscegenation" is probably the least interesting way to get Rumi to "encroaching demonhood," and in a movie where "rooting it in Korean culture" can sometimes mean "running through a just startling number of broad Korean signifiers" (to the point where there's a crypto-mukbang gag about disgusting gluttony), the single most East Asian thing about it might be its obvious discomfort with backing a protagonist who's half-Korean, half-demon into the corner of a race allegory.

This is all, I think, more minor than major; things threaten to get major with the fact that this is a movie that barely has time for two main characters, despite the premise requiring it to have, at a minimum, four; I've seen Huntr/x described as having Powerpuff Girls personalities, which is entirely accurate but still perhaps insufficient, insofar as Bubbles and Buttercup here still only get their respective boilerplate across by repeating their character descriptions, "I'm spiky and hard to get along with" and "I guess I'm an affable idiot," over and over, and it's rare that even their one dimensions get actually demonstrated.  Happily, KPop Demon Hunters, despite its affirmatively plural title, can get along without that, but it's awfully noticeable (as is a smattering of egregious "Netflix dialogue" of the sort that tells you what just happened in case you were using the television as your second screen instead of watching the fucking movie).  This can mean that the comedy, and there's a lot of comedy, has a tendency to spend a great deal of time occupying a single pitch of, basically, self-description, and in conjunction with a necessity for excessive infodumping, it also means things have a very difficult time starting till the Saja Boys show up to provide their antagonism.

I don't think I'd argue that it's a thoroughly successful comedy, but I have some doubts I'll laugh at many things harder in 2025 than I did the Saja Boys' introduction, which is about as contemptuous a visual parody of boy bands as it could be while still pretending to be good-natured, and about as contemptuous of female sexual desire as I think I've ever seen in a general audiences movie directed by a woman, and I'd be less inclined to spoil this one gag than any of the movie's plot twists, but Rumi being sent flying into the air, in slow motion, due to being slightly nudged on the shoulder is just insanely amusing).  It also has some bracingly odd "is it funny when the pacing is unexpectedly dragged through tar?" bits with its Korean folklore-based tiger and magpie, which must've made the animators laugh, and I suppose I'll allow it.

What's admirable, though, is that Kang and Appelhans make a comedy that's also an animated action-romance musical that, by virtue of its form, can support cartoon jokes, and they're pretty great at keeping those jokes from undercutting their movie, mostly by dedicating them to their own scenes (the "part of the nickel tour of Korean culture where we make fun of alternative medicine" sequence going about as far as it possibly could in pursuit of 2-D deformations on 3-D character models, by way of some dumbfoundingly buggy eyes) or at least basing the jokes well enough in story that the callbacks to the goofier bits in the midst of epic action sequences are well-judged enough, and confined to the secondary cast enough, to be funny rather than a bother.  So "tonal control," they've got it, and they've made a cool-looking action-romance musical cartoon to boot.  It may well represent the moment that the Spider-Verse baseline style stopped being exciting (it's still a little distinctive: there's a sort of "special color section of a manga, or if you prefer manhua" that's a few steps away from the Spider-Verses' "American comic book" pastiche), but that doesn't mean the graphically-flattened rendering and frame-dropped, snap-to-pose animation isn't working on this movie's behalf, and, hell, it can even let you attend to the actual design without pointing at this revolutionary thing or that revolutionary thing, and KPop Demon Hunters has some pretty swell design.  I have covered the Saja Boys generally (I don't think I ever really stopped chuckling at "Mystery Saja"), who thanks to being the villains in an animated film I suppose have the privilege of being more dynamic and interesting to look at than the heroines.  At least it's difficult, I think, to argue that their rebuild as literal Korean grim reapers, horsehair hats atop black silhouettes, who've suckered the entire population of the country into submitting to their evil music, isn't pretty bitchin'.  Meanwhile, there's Gwi-ma, who's a notably good version of the "sort of nothing?" cosmic entity, mostly characterized as a completely inhuman wall of pink-and-blue flame (even his final form is only humanoid enough to engage in an action sequence), with more active villainy properly delegated to a deuteragonist (hey, Moana 2! you suck!) to keep him an eldritch threat, and it doesn't hurt that I would probably give Lee Byung-hun the title of best VA performance in rendering Gwi-ma aloof and ethereal, even if that could seem a little backhanded (and, you know, it'd have been nice if the other VAs had agreed on a single pronunciation of "Gwi-ma" rather than, by my count, three).  But that reminds me of one of my biggest nitpicks, which is the same as in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (so good company), "what the hell does this concert audience think is happening?"

Concert-wise and otherwise, in KPop Demon Hunters we do have one of the better goes in a while at pursuing an actual animated musical; I would imagine that if you liked K-pop, or maybe were just more familiar with K-pop so the "it's bland/now they're rapping" dichotomy didn't come as such a belligerent surprise, you might consider it a great musical.  Now, not a single song here (credit's split between a zillion people) is bad, but I don't know how good they're trying to be, either; and one of those other objections I didn't get to was probably my least-favorite thing about the movie, the dialogue's irritating and perpetual insistence than the Saja Boys' dipshitty first hit, "Soda Pop," was "actually good" or even "actually catchy," which would've been pushy even if it had been.  Then again, the Sajas' "Your Idol" is probably the best song (if not that, "Takedown"), each having a sort of urgent undercurrent giving them energy.  Frustratingly, the movie straight fucks itself as a musical at a pretty important inflection point; it's been likeably loose, mind you, about the diegesis, technically a "backstager" but very content with characters bursting out into song in any circumstance that might benefit from it, and such a circumstance comes around when Rumi and Jinu find themselves, more-or-less, secretly dating.  Thus "Free," their romantic interlude, and I have no dislike of it as a cut on the soundtrack but the production of it, for these purposes, is some devastatingly incompetent stuff, two characters Batman-and-Catwomaning over rooftops, wary of one another at the same time they're being drawn together, and for some reason singing to each other through some kind of distortion filter that I wish I knew enough about music to call it by its specific name, and so much less emotional than it quite easily ought to be.  The neat thing about the soundtrack, though, is in fact the conceit that most of these songs are, theoretically, singles intended for release by the respective bands—it's not that they're as such "well-written" and in at least one case a lyric approaches the Wish benchmark of "that's neither a real idiom nor good poetry" with "why did we cover up the colors inside our head"; but I do think there's something terribly interesting going on with how Huntr/x's song about genociding demons effectively conceals itself as an incredibly vicious break-up song, and the Saja Boys' arrogant popstar hype anthem is only barely concealing that it's really a triumphal, demonic cackle.  I guess it turns out that pop music will in fact eat... you.  Or, it'll save you.  It can go either way.

Score: 7/10

*The same studio that brought us the Emoji Movie in 2017 will be releasing a movie called Goat in 2026, the latter hopefully inaugurating a grand cinematic universe of films all based on literal renditions of obnoxious Younger Millennial/Zoomer slang.

**It may be worth remembering that the highest-grossing Japanese movie of all time was the 2023 Demon Slayer feature.  However, this apparently doesn't have anything to do with this movie, which was greenlit in 2021.

***Also if Sinners had a more coherent idea of what it wanted to do with music vis-a-vis the supernatural.