‘K-Pop Demon Hunters’ Review: When demons are just society in disguise

You know that face. The one people make when you say K-pop. Or worse, K-drama. That eye-roll, the dismissive scoff, maybe even the dreaded word: cringe. Funny how things millions of women love get thrown into that category, right? K-pop, Twilight, The Notebook, even Barbie. Remember when it was Oppenheimer vs. Barbie summer, as if joy and existential dread had to be enemies? It’s not that these things are bad, it’s that they’re feminine. And for a long time, that was enough to make people take them less seriously.

This knee-jerk dismissal is exactly why K-Pop Demon Hunters works so well. It takes that “cringe” label and flips it into something surprisingly profound. The title sounds like something someone came up with in a fever dream after binge-watching BTS music videos and an entire season of Goblin. A K-pop girl group that moonlights as demon hunters, protecting the Honmoon (a magical barrier that keeps demons locked away from our world), maintained by generations of demon hunters through song. Their enemies, in the “now-verse”, are a demon boy band draining fans’ energy through concerts. If you rolled your eyes reading that, the film knew you would.

But here’s the twist: it works. Not in a “so-bad-it’s-good” way. In a way that’s actually doing something clever.

On the surface, it’s ridiculous: a K-pop girl group (members: Rumi, Mira, and Zoey) fighting demons while maintaining their Billboard chart position. But here’s what strikes me: the demons feel less like supernatural monsters and more like shame, self-doubt, and the crushing weight of perfectionism that the entertainment industry dumps on young performers. 

The demon king Gwi-Ma feeds on human insecurities, which reads to me like every talent agency’s business model. If you’ve ever been a teenage girl, or just been told you were “too emotional” for caring about something like pop music, there’s something familiar in how these demons operate.

The Saja Boys, the demon boy band, drain fans’ energy to weaken the barrier protecting humanity. Sound familiar? It should. It’s every manufactured pop group designed to extract maximum emotional and financial investment from their audience. The film’s genius lies in making this literal; these pretty boys are actually soul-sucking demons, but the metaphor hits harder than any straightforward industry critique.

Rumi, the half-demon protagonist, embodies every performer’s internal struggle. She’s literally part of what she’s supposed to destroy, hiding her true nature from her bandmates while questioning whether demons deserve the hatred directed at them. It’s the perfect allegory for anyone who’s ever felt like they don’t belong in their own success story, or wondered if the thing that makes them different is actually their greatest strength. The unspoken pressure behind every polished Instagram post, every idol who smiles through hate comments, it’s all there.

The directors, Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, and the animation team create stunning visuals without being flashy for flashy’s sake. Drawing inspiration from the bold graphic look of Sony’s Spider-Verse films, characters shift from idol-perfect to gremlin-chaotic depending on the scene’s emotional weight. It’s a glitter bomb of fight scenes, banger musical numbers, and characters who are messy, angry, funny, and real in that “they definitely eat instant noodles at 3 am” kind of way.

What strikes me about this film is how it handles its themes. The film doesn’t shy away from the fact that the entertainment industry chews up young people, especially women. But instead of being preachy about it, it lets its characters work through shame, identity crises, and the pressure to be perfect while fighting actual monsters.

There’s something genuinely gutsy about the film choosing not to make its villains totally villainous.

Gwi-Ma feels like pure destructive force, but the demons he controls seem more like broken people with pain that hasn’t healed. Even Jinu (flawless jawlines aside) isn’t evil. He’s just been told, for centuries, that his shame defines him. To me, the real victory isn’t defeating the demon king; it’s Rumi accepting her dual nature and her friends accepting her for who she really is.

The voice cast brings authentic emotional weight to what could have been a gimmicky concept. Arden Cho makes Rumi’s identity crisis feel genuinely painful, while Ahn Hyo-seop gives Jinu enough complexity that you understand why he makes the choices he does. Even the supporting Huntrix members feel like real people rather than K-pop archetypes.

The music works brilliantly. When a film about the power of music has boring songs, the whole thing falls apart. Here, tracks like “Free”, “Soda Pop”, “Takedown” and “Golden” work both as plot devices and genuinely catchy pop songs.

Sure, the ending ties things up a bit too neatly, and some character arcs could use more development. But those are minor complaints about a film that manages to be simultaneously ridiculous and emotionally honest. It takes everything people mock about K-pop culture and asks: what if the thing you’re dismissing actually contains profound truths about identity, belonging, and the courage to be yourself?

K-Pop Demon Hunters understands that calling something “cringe” is often just another way of dismissing experiences that don’t centre traditional (read: male) perspectives. It’s a film that says yes, young women screaming at concerts might look silly to you, but maybe there’s something powerful about that collective joy and connection that’s worth protecting. If Barbie was about girlhood’s dream and disappointment, K-Pop Demon Hunters is about the armour girls build through fandom and art. It’s about how loving something, unapologetically, can be resistance.

In a world where everything authentic gets labelled manufactured and everything popular gets called shallow, this movie dares to suggest that maybe the demons aren’t in the music; they’re in the voices telling us to be ashamed of what we love. It’s not subtle. But it shouldn’t be. Some metaphors need to wear glitter.