K-pop Demon Hunters, 5/10
This garnered enough of my curiosity that I decided to watch it. I'm always interested to see what bubbles up in this new golden age of animation, and I'd say KPDH mostly deserves it. The animation style's pretty cool, the fight scenes are pretty cool, the design is pretty cool, and there are some genuinely interesting character dynamics at play. Apparently this movie's also very accurate to Korean culture, so props for that, not that I'd know. But it is interesting that we've had two movies in 2025 about the power of music relating supernatural forces that are also celebrations of their respective culture. In a way Sinners is almost the other side of the coin to this: Sinners is about the past and the very roots of America, whereas KPDH is about the here and now.
But I'll admit it: this film made me feel old. I'm out of the loop when it comes to anything K-pop related, and this movie felt like it was trying to invoke relating to an experience that I simply lack. This is a film made for K-pop fans first and foremost, and god damn did I have a hard time trying to engage with that aspect. Overly sugary, cheesy corporate pop music is not my thing at the best of times, and some of it in this movie unfortunately brought me back to the days of the most ear-grating "bottles, models" club EDM of the early 2010s. Whereas western pop music has long since drifted in a more interesting direction with the likes of Chappell Roan, The Weeknd, Dua Lipa and others, K-pop (if this movie's depiction is accurate to its current state) still seems to be about the blandest, shallowest, most vague and demographic-maximizing radio filler. That, and K-pop has always just sounded awkward at best, cringeworthy at worst to me. On several occasions I had to pause the movie and listen to some of the screamiest, angriest deathcore I could find so I could feel I was at balance.
No matter how hard I tried to just turn my brain off, I simply could not shake the niggling sense that this was basically an unironic celebration of a notoriously predatory industry and some of the worst blights of modern society: parasociality, corporatization, stan culture and social media trends. It's impossible for the movie's message about not hiding your true self come across as so fucking insincere and hollow when it's depicted through the lens of an industry known for predatory contracts, exploitation, pushing impossible beauty standards, controlling every aspect of the artists' lives and generally treating them more like cattle than human beings. It's downright perverse.
I tried to put my biases aside when rating this film, but it ultimately comes down to one question: would I watch this again? And I'd be lying if I said yes. If you're not into K-pop I'd rate your chances of finding this any more than mediocre pretty slim.
letterboxd.com
Seriously, the soul stealing demonic bad guys got nothing on the K-Pop idol industry. Heck, they could've made the plot about how Huntrix discovers that the industry people they've been contracted to are actual demons that they need to fight. That at least would've said something.
