KPop Demon Hunters (United States, 2025). A Sony Pictures Entertainment/Creative BC/Columbia Pictures Co-Production, a Netflix Release. Directors: Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang. Writers: Danya Jimenez, Hannah McMehan, Maggie Kang, Chris Appelhans. Cinematographer: Gary H. Lee. Music: Marcelo Zarvos. CAST: Arden Cho (Rumi), Mary Hong (Mira), Yoo Ji-young (Zoey), Ahn Hyo-seop (Jinu), Ken Jeong (Bobby), Lee Byung-Heon (Gwima), Kim Yun-jin (Celine), Daniel Dae Kim (Doctor Han).
Note: I am scheduling a discussion of this runaway Netflix hit with our go-to k-pop specialist, Ms. Mayako Shibagaki-Liu, currently a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Korean History at Harvard University. I will try to suggest a few salient points of interest throughout this review which will then be expanded further in the discussion with Dr. Shibagaki-Liu.
If you are reasonably familiar with the K-pop scenes as well as the global ascendancy of the Korean popular culture as I have been in the last two decades or so, a title like KPop Demon Hunters (stylized as “KPop” instead of “Kpop” but whatever) has a certain ring of inevitability. Inundated with case studies such as an unassuming science fiction-themed Korean-language stage musical, Maybe Happy Ending, being adapted into an English-language Broadway musical and sweeping up six Tony Awards in 2025, no one can dispute the ability of the Korean “cultural template,” however you define it, to combine drama and music in such a way that the final product could massively appeal to a large swath of global consumer population.
KPop Demon Hunters, produced by Sony’s animation studios currently best known for the Spider-Verse series (but also behind Smurf and Angry Bird films), takes as its premise an idea that many young K-pop fans probably fantasized about and on which some had possibly written fan fictions: that your favorite K-pop girl group secretly moonlights as kick-ass female warriors defending the entire world (represented by swooning, crying and cover-dancing K-pop fans of all ages, ethnicities and genders) from an apocalyptic demon invasion.
The triad of heroines, Rumi, Zoey and Mira, members of the group Huntr/x, are presented in a prologue as spiritual descendants of shamans, whose vocal performances generate a shimmering force field called Honmoon (魂門, as in a “spiritual gate?”) protecting the unsuspecting masses from soul-devouring demons. The demons themselves are designed in an American animation-like way to resemble over-decorated, toothy “goblins” (dokkaebi, an analogue of oni in Japanese), but in Korean subtitles are referred to as angnyeong, 悪霊 “evil spirits,” not exactly the same thing, but never mind. The central antagonist of the film is a big boss demon called Gwima (鬼魔, not the most creative name), whose amorphous, living-flame countenance reminds me of the Master Control Program in the original Tron, skillfully voiced by Lee Byung-heon (in both English and Korean). However, the film’s crucial Darth Vader figure, a tragic supervillain, is Jinu (voiced by the Korean-Canadian actor Ahn Hyo-seop, Netflix’s Business Proposal), a Joseon dynast minstrel who had become Gwima’s top underling. It is the growing bond between the courageous but vulnerable Rumi and the outwardly nonchalant but internally tormented Jinu that unexpectedly captures a viewer’s heart and serves as a glue that holds together the film’s disparate generic elements and shifting tonalities.
To its credit, KPop Demon Hunter’s appeals have multiple layers, and they are, for the most part, handled very well. To be sure, the feature dutifully contains those elements seemingly catering to the toddler/preteen demographic that could be cringe-inducing for those outside the pen: others just feel like they come with the territory of a US-produced feature animation. There are requisite Tik-Tok-friendly depictions of fan activism, and funny, cute moments of the Huntr/x goofing around, referencing deformé aesthetics of Japanese manga/animation as well as audio-visual zinger-dominated American humor.
Not really a fan of either style, I wish there were perhaps twenty-per-cent less of these materials and more of anthropological explorations of the urban Seoul life and technical and cultural sides of the k-pop scenes (how about make-up artists or fashion coordinators as meaningful characters?), although admittedly there are more of the latter in this feature than in all of the other Korea-set Hollywood genre films combined.
Despite these caveats, I was pleasantly surprised to see KPop Demon Hunters earnestly attempting to, without deviating too much from its predictably genre-bound plot points and setups, explore the themes germane to k-pop as an artform and an industry. KPop Demon Hunters transforms the pressure to maintain the façade of perfection that its characters are burdened with into one of its themes. Rumi’s character in particular goes through a persuasive arc of self-discovery. She first suspects that the demons she had been fighting might not be so “inhuman” as she had been told, and then that her identity as a demon hunter is an elaborate fabrication that does not reflect who she really is.
As Rumi’s mentor Celine at one point pleads to her, “our faults and fears must never be seen.” K-pop artists who so often sing about self-love and realization of their subjectivities, “doing your own thing no matter what others say,” could feel that they are not allowed to show to the world who they really are, hiding their “faults and fears” from the public. In this regard, Rumi’s tentative romance with Jinu feels a lot like a camouflaged tryst between a real-life male and female k-pop artist hiding from both their companies and fans (who can be cruel and censorious under the mantra of “love”).
Rumi’s ultimate rejection of this false sense of duty (in substance a form of subservience to the industrial capital and the consumer-fanbase) thus carries a resonance that goes beyond a plot point. It would have been interesting if KPop Demon Hunters further explored this dark side of fandom, developing a character or characters whose all-consuming adoration for the Huntr/x or the demon boy group Saja Boys allow Gwima to plunder the negative psychological energy of dehumanizing obsession and entitlement to exploit the artists for their own pleasure. Again, this might have been considered too downbeat or disturbing for a movie aspiring to be a clean-cut, uplifting entertainment.
Just as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, another unexpectedly thoughtful recent hit, is less of a horror film than a musical, KPop Demon is at heart a musical. Action sequences are reasonably well done but are not special. For me, these demon-fighting activities felt like obligatory connecting tissues between musical numbers, rather than the other way. Indeed, KDH’s real historical value may lie in its status as the first global K-pop-themed musical produced by those who clearly get what kpop is all about, rather than by those who want to ride the latter’s coattails while seeing it only as a “fad” or a factory churning out exploitable commodities.
The direction and mises-en-scenes for k-pop musical numbers in the film are impeccably orchestrated to reflect the stylistics and affective strategies of the videos generated by k-pop labels and TV station music programs such as Inkigayo and Music Bank. The notion of a male demon k-pop band, Saja Boys (saja could stand for “lion” 獅子, “dead person” 死者 or “emissary” 使者 respectively), is never played for laughs, despite the expected “cartoonish” exaggerations of their ripped physique and “cool” personalities. Even better, the musical numbers feel organically tied to the dilemmas, aspirations and inner turmoil of the characters, precisely in the ways that the first-rank k-pop songs and music videos reflect those of their artists. As many who read this review would already know, BTS’s Black Swan is not a song about partying or even about having a positive outlook in life: it is about an artist’s fear of losing his creative voice. There are a lot of authentic expressions of self-reflection including honest reckonings of self-doubt, suffering and misdirected hate in k-pop for those who have ears to listen to them.
It helps a lot that the production team did not stint on locating the right level of vocal (singing) talents for musical performances of Huntr/x and Saja Boys. Many of these talents had worked with or for real-life kpop teams and production companies: Ejae (Kim Eun-jae), Rumi’s singing voice, is a former SM Entertainment trainee and has written for Red Velvet (“Pscyho”), Twice (“Flow Like Waves,” etc.), Aespa (“Drama”) KARD and NMIXX, among other groups. Jinu’s singing voice is done by Andrew Choi (Choi Seung-hyun), another SM Entertainment veteran who had contributed to the works of DAY6, Taemin and Monsta X. Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami sing for Mira and Zoey, respectively, and NeckWAV, SamUILLee, Danny Chung (who works for Teddy Park’s Black Label) and Kevin Woo, a former member of the idol group U-KISS (2008-2017), represent Saja Boys.
Given this impressive collection of vocal talents, it is not altogether surprising that the musical numbers come across much less like those featured in live Hollywood musicals or feature animations than real-life k-pop music videos or stage performances. The songs assigned to Huntr/x and Saja Boys sound very much like second- and third-generation k-pop music, less experimental (“weird”) and more strongly anthemic. This makes sense if one considers the film’s gestation period, around five to six years. It was being put together as a project at the time when main k-pop references were presumably Twice, Blackpink and BTS, just having reached or about to reach the zenith of their global popularity. My favorite among the songs would be Rumi and Jinu’s duet “Free,” heartfelt, powerful and unencumbered by an obligation to address plot mechanics or the background spectacle. But even Saja Boy’s “Your Idol” is presented as if it were a “comeback” tune by a real-life A-list k-pop group such as Ateez or Stray Kids, its seductive and vampiric lyrics seamlessly integrated into their super-cool “dark” stylistics.
As a flame-breathing geezer DIVE, I cannot help but note (and I am by no means the only one who noticed this) that Huntr/x’s signature song “Golden” sounds very similar to IVE’s “I AM” (especially coming after their inside-airplane battle with demons that open the movie, in what I can only assume is an homage to the I AM MV), and that their song of reconciliation “What It Sounds Like” has the refrain structure almost identical to that of IVE’s “All Night,” itself a reappropriation of Icona Pop’s 2013 song. I find these similarities interesting or telling rather than concerning, but as a DIVE I hope they serve to herd some global non-k-pop fans toward IVE’s stupendous musical accomplishments (and how much their music and performances follow the “royal path” of k-pop, as the critic Kim Do-heon has pretty much admitted during his discussion of KDH’s success).
Finally, one note about the film’s representation and repackaging of “Korean culture:” what KPop Demon Hunters does exceptionally well is to reinvent certain aesthetic features of the traditional Korean culture— a direct incorporation of decorative “patterns” (munyang 文様) into the film’s premise, for example— for the global consumer base. Thank God it does not do something stupid like harping on the cuisinary superpower of kimchi. The producer’s skills and good tastes are best exemplified in the designs of the obligatory cute-animal characters, in this case familiars/messengers of Jinu, a blue tiger who probably looks to non-Koreans like a bizarre hybrid between Chesshire Cat and My Neighbor Totoro’s Catbus, and six-eyed magpie wearing a miniature yangban hat. They are obviously inspired by a subgenre of traditional Korean paintings featuring a tiger and a magpie, jakhodo 鵲虎圖. They beautifully capture the goofily humorous, earthily charming qualities of these folk paintings, while providing necessary doses of otherworldliness: I even loved the tiger’s method of teleportation, slowly elevating itself out of, or down into, a glowing portal in the floor.
KPop Demon Hunters is far from being the final word on a globally accessible, high-quality content— cinema, musical theater, TV drama, animation, webtoon/manhwa, all of which could be creatively cross-bred with one another— focused on the k-pop experience. Even as a fantasy-musical blend, KDH, as competent and ingenious as it is, does not exhaustively mine the potentials of its premise. However, this is a genuinely promising start: I hope that the undisputed and clearly well-deserved success of KDH will pave the way for more adventurous and risk-taking but equally sincere and convincing projects involving k-pop in the future.
