Review: KPop Demon Hunters Teaches Us That Harmony Thwarts Evil

KPop Demon Hunters, a Netflix original movie released worldwide on June 20, quickly became the most-watched movie on the platform, amassing over 314 million views by mid-September. It also earned much popular praise and critical acclaim.

The conceit: Demon hunters use the gift of song to unite the world in (literal) harmony by creating the “Golden Honmoon,” an impregnable barrier against demons. The latest generation of demon hunters make up the wildly popular girl group Huntr/x. They are opposed by the Saja Boys, a heartthrob demon boy band led by Jinu, a self-loathing demon who acquired a life of luxury by abandoning his mother and little sister to poverty.

The Saja Boys erode the Honmoon by winning the adoration of Huntr/x’s fans and nearly destroy it by exposing Rumi as part demon—a fact she’d hidden at her mentor’s well-intentioned but ill-considered behest.

The movie’s moral: Harmony thwarts evil while discord abets it. Given Rumi’s background, there is also the pleasingly cosmopolitan side point that ancestry does not define one’s essence or role. Peace can only be attained by those who accept their complex natures instead of pretending they are without “faults and fears.”