KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters is approximately exactly what you think, with a glitzy K-pop soundtrack, fabulous animation, and scary demons. As the story goes, generations of female K-pop acts have secretly been demon hunters, running down the dark creatures with great ferocity and protecting their fans and humans generally. Now it’s the fictional girl group trio Huntrix picking up the mantle. The specific narrative arc here is that one of the singers in the group—Rumi, the one with the stupendous coil of hair—is secretly part-demon and must learn to come to terms with it. Awww... The animation is mainly what makes the picture work as well as it does, wild, vivid, expressive, verging on the psychedelia of the Spider-Verse movies. Besides Huntrix (with Rumi, Mira, and Zoey), there is a five-piece boy band, the Saja Boys, who are under the control of the Satan figure here, Gwi-Ma. Gwi-Ma is in the business of buying up and consuming souls. Jinu is the leader of the Saja Boys. Naturally he and Rumi fall in star-crossed love. Rumi must learn to accept and love herself for who she is while Jinu is trying to work through a lot of well-deserved bad karma. But he’s not so bad himself. Awww... Out here on the K-pop tip I don’t know much so my expectations (and hopes) were more for something in perhaps an EDM vein, rhythmic and seductive sexy and romantic for the dancefloor, but as I should have known what I got was a lot of pop warbling about self-help self-esteem self-care, with selfies for the fans etc. Huntrix’s songs are explicitly written in the sessions we see as messages of hope and strength for their fans. Awww... The animation does not fool around with these demons—I can believe they would be quite scary for little kids. Some 13 minutes are reserved for the end credits and include live-action shots of the main voice artists singing and carrying on—it’s as fun as the best parts of the rest of it, so think about sticking around awhile. If the music would have been better (the Saja Boys are no better than Huntrix but there’s no reason to expect them to be), and the story a little less on-the-nose inspirational, KPop Demon Hunters might have been something special. As it is it’s reasonably entertaining, not that I mean to damn with faint praise.