Review: KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

 KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Rated PG for action/violence, scary images, thematic elements, some suggestive material and brief language

Score: 4 out of 5

I don't think KPop Demon Hunters was a movie that anybody was expecting to be any good. It's an animated family comedy that was made for Netflix, a streaming service with a well-earned reputation for churning out absolute swill in order to maximize viewer retention, and even with Sony Pictures Animation, makers of some of the best animated films of this decade, producing it, most people, myself included, were expecting something pretty cringeworthy just from the basic premise and the family audience it was aimed at. Retreads of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are already a timeworn setup for youth-focused urban fantasy stories to begin with, and throwing K-pop into the mix just felt like pandering and an attempt to cash in on a trend. The animation looked great, as befitting SPA, but that merely presented the risk that this movie would wind up like the worst caricature of a K-pop idol: beautiful, but vacuous.

Instead, it became a big enough hit that, last weekend, it got a special, one-weekend-only theatrical release for the fans that managed to top the box office. And I was one of them. I first saw this movie a few days after it premiered on Netflix thanks to hearing everybody raving about it, and I saw it again in theaters because it was just that good. Yes, it's a pretty shallow movie whose plot gets wobbly in the third act, but like the best K-pop songs, it is one that sticks in your head just because of the immaculate craftsmanship put into it by everybody involved, from writers/directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans to the cast to the animators to the songwriters. It's a movie where I understand why the parents of young children instinctively cringe the moment they hear the first notes of "Golden", the same way people who were raising little kids in 2013 still cringe when they hear the first notes of "Let It Go": because this is a movie that children have been playing on repeat for months, and can you blame them? It deserves the hype, and marks another notch in the belt of an animation studio that has been on a hot streak lately.

The premise is that, for hundreds of years, a trio of female musician-warriors have protected Korea from the demon lord Gwi-ma and his army of the damned. Being singers isn't just incidental to their mission; their voices and the adoration of their fans power the Honmoon, a magical barrier that keeps demons sealed up in Hell and prevents them from crossing over to our world. Many women have been hunters over the years, and today, the role is taken up by HUNTR/X (pronounced "huntrix"), the biggest girl group in the world, comprised of Mira, the lead dancer and "bad girl" of the group, Zoey, who was born and raised in Burbank, California and serves as the group's rapper, and last but not least, Rumi, the lead singer and daughter of a previous hunter who's carrying on a family tradition. Under the guidance of Celine, a retired former singer/hunter who was part of the same band as Rumi's mother, they use the modern K-pop media machinery and their millions of fans to make the Honmoon bigger and brighter than ever, frustrating Gwi-ma's efforts to feast on humanity's souls. One day, however, a demon named Jinu approaches his devilish master with an idea. Hundreds of years ago, Jinu was a struggling musician who sold his soul to Gwi-ma so he could enjoy fame and fortune in the king's court and provide for his family, and even in Hell, he never lost his musical talent. Jinu seeks to hit HUNTR/X where it hurts, having put together a boy band called the Saja Boys with four other demons in order to steal HUNTR/X's fans and, with it, the source of their power, and in return, Gwi-ma will wipe Jinu's memory of his shameful past. Now, HUNTR/X must battle a new threat like they've never faced before, all while Rumi's deepest, darkest secret -- that she's actually half-demon, born from an affair between her mother and one of the very monsters she was sworn to hunt -- grows increasingly hard to cover up and threatens to blow up the entire band at a critical moment.

The first experience most people have had with this movie, and thus the logical place to begin, is with the music. This is, after all, a full-blown K-pop musical, and while a lot of the songs are diegetic, performed in-universe at concerts and other events, many more are not -- and even the concerts are usually the scenes of major story beats. I needed to buy both HUNTR/X and the Saja Boys as bands that could sell out stadiums, and... well, if you've looked at the Billboard Hot 100 lately, you'd know that Netflix could probably run a concert tour with the actual musicians (a mix of real K-pop performers and songwriters and independent American artists) who wrote and performed the songs in this movie. Yeah, the soundtrack here slaps. I've been playing it in my car for weeks, the songs are legitimately that good even outside the context of the movie (and even better within it), and it's gotten me to start dipping my toes into K-pop more broadly. There are seven songs, some of them are performed more than once in different contexts, and none of them are songs that I'd skip. "How It's Done", our introduction to HUNTR/X, is a highly energetic banger that's all about them whooping demons six ways from Sunday, as is "Takedown", a diss track aimed at the Saja Boys that winds up taking on a very different meaning thanks to the events of the film. "Golden" is HUNTR/X's big "I want" song that represents them at the height of their power, "Free" is a sweet ballad performed by Rumi and Jinu as they start to realize that they have more in common than they were led to believe, and finally, "What It Sounds Like", the song from the grand finale, brings it to a triumphant finish. And as for the Saja Boys, on one hand "Soda Pop", our introduction to them, is a frankly hilarious song that feels like every obnoxiously catchy earworm you've heard on Top 40 radio in the last thirty years funneled into the shallowest and most unintentionally suggestive pop ditty this side of "Backdoor Lover" (side note: if you've never seen the Josie and the Pussycats movie, go see the Josie and the Pussycats movie), while on the other hand, "Your Idol" is a bombastic villain song of a sort that we haven't really seen much of since '90s Renaissance-era Disney, one in which the parasocial relationships that fans form with their favorite celebrities are compared to the more literal kind of idolatry. The soundtrack to this movie is, well, golden, one that has undoubtedly made this movie the sensation that it is and does a lot to sell its characters as legitimate pop idols.

But a great soundtrack isn't enough to make a great movie, and that part comes from the characters themselves. Rumi, Mira, and Zoey all have distinctive designs and personalities, with Rumi serving as the classic heroine and getting most of the main arc in the film about learning to be yourself and embrace your quirks while Mira and Zoey alternate between comic relief (Mira the comically serious one, Zoey the bratty kid) and fully fleshed-out, if two-dimensional, characters in their own right as they react to Rumi's actions and secrets. It's a pretty simple story on their part, but HUNTR/X made a great anchor for it. Their respective voice actors Arden Cho, May Hong, and Ji-young Yoo made them feel like a team as much as they did three individual women, and the animators likewise made them all stand out from each other with creative designs while also making their feats look convincingly spectacular. I've already seen tons of girls dressed up in HUNTR/X cosplay at conventions, I expect to see plenty more knocking on my door come Halloween asking for candy, and I totally get why these ladies clicked. From my perspective, however, the most interesting character in the film is Jinu. A sympathetic villain who is still very clearly a bad guy is a tough tightrope to walk, and Jinu, between his writing and Ahn Hyo-seop's performance, nails it and winds up as one of the best family film villains in recent memory. He is haunted by what he did to get himself turned into a demon, having lost everything he ever cared about thanks to his shortsighted deal with Gwi-ma, and part of him still longs to make amends for it, something that draws him to Rumi as the two of them connect despite their differences. At the end of the day, however, he is still a demon firmly under Gwi-ma's control, a relationship that I've seen others read as metaphorical for the worst abuses of the K-pop industry (I don't know much about it, but I've heard horror stories), and both his and Rumi's failure to recognize his faults make everything that much harder for everyone. Jinu is a figure who I didn't necessarily want to see succeed, but still wanted to find some closure in his miserable unlife. Add on a great supporting cast, from Ken Jeong's friendly and blissfully unaware manager Bobby to Daniel Dae Kim's back-alley quack doctor who's more insightful than he seems to the many unnamed diehard fans who reappear throughout the film, and this was a movie brimming with personality in its characters.

Last but certainly not least, the film is as much a feast for the eyes as it is for the ears. The music scenes and fight scenes alike felt like K-pop music videos at their most bombastic and extravagant, the animation being trademark modern SPA in its stylization and willingness to break from the "traditional" Disney/Pixar style in favor of more stylization and influences from anime. The concerts feel grand, like you're down there with thousands of people cheering on the characters yourself, and the action scenes feel graceful and elegant while still hard-hitting and packing a ton of intensity as demons swarm the superpowered protagonists, like a Devil May Cry game with a trio of pop singers in place of Dante. I'd also like to applaud the character designs that walk a fine line of showing the heroes and villains as sexy, stylish, and fashionable (as K-pop idols tend to be) while keeping it PG and not blatantly objectifying them (as K-pop idols also tend to be). Seriously, this is a movie that manages to put three very attractive women in skintight leather outfits in one scene and then find a way to make it the goofiest and most hilariously unsexy thing possible.

Alas, as much as I did enjoy this movie, it's not a perfect one. After a rock-solid first hour, the movie's third act feels like it's just speeding ahead to its conclusion, and another scene or two explaining certain decisions probably could've fleshed it out more. At 100 minutes, this movie isn't too long, and while the finale was anchored by back-to-back performances of two of the best songs in the film, some added character moments before it might have made it work that much better. In particular, it felt like Celine was sorely underused. She's voiced by a pretty big star in Yunjin Kim, she's the band's trainer and mentor (its Giles figure, basically, for any Buffy fans reading this), she'd previously been a hunter herself as part of a band with Rumi's mother, she raised Rumi from a young age after her mother died, and she probably knows exactly what happened with Rumi's mother and the demon she fell in love with that produced a half-demon daughter. And yet, she only appears in a small handful of scenes throughout the film, hardly enough to register as the major presence in HUNTR/X's lives that she's supposed to be. It felt like there were ideas for an interesting character that were reserved for a sequel, to the point that she barely felt like a character of her own here, meaning that a lot of the drama that emerges between her and Rumi in the third act felt hollow. I would've added a scene of her looking at Rumi and Jinu's relationship and having flashbacks to what happened to Rumi's mother (which is never fully explained, but there are hints), and from this creating some moral cloudiness around Rumi and Jinu that sees Celine trying to warn Rumi not to trust him -- that, while she thinks she's saving a wayward soul, he may very well be corrupting hers. As it stands, though, Celine's lack of much of a real purpose was a noticeable blemish on what was otherwise a great movie.

The Bottom Line

While the story at times feels like it's getting ahead of itself and serves as just an excuse to get to the music and action, it doesn't change the fact that that music and action, as well as the characters partaking in it, are awesome in their own right. Consider me a HUNTR/X fan, because I really enjoyed this movie and I'm excited for the sequel.