The most reliable formula in action cinema today is having Ma Dong-seok one-punch a bunch of anonymous stuntmen into a wall. After hitting it big (so to speak) in 2016 with Train to Busan, the man also known as Don Lee has been brawling his way into our hearts with the likes of The Roundup series (three sequels to his 2017 The Outlaws, with another one on the way), Badland Hunters, and even a foray into the MCU with The Eternals. This year’s Ma vehicle is Holy Night: Demon Hunters, which dares to ask the question: can even the armies of Satan himself withstand the blows of Ma Dong-seok’s mighty fists? Of course, they cannot.
Ma stars as the brawny part of a trio of exorcists. While one of the team, Sharon (played by Seohyun, from the K-pop supergroup Girls’ Generation), does the actual exorcising by putting her hands on the victims’ forehead and chanting in a strange language, and the other one, played by Lee David (from Bong Joon-ho’s Mother and Lee Kwang-kuk’s underseen classic Romance Joe), hangs around in the background filming everything, Ma stands guard. As the forces of darkness, humans who may or may not also be possessed, come to prevent the exorcism, Ma punches them so hard their demon souls come flying out of their bodies. It is, like every Ma Dong-seok action sequence, both hilarious and extremely cool.
The world of Holy Night: Demon Hunters is an eclectic amalgam of religions, mostly Catholic Christianity of course, but with Eastern twists (bamboo fronds, magic mirrors), a mix that matches its tone, pitched somewhere between the serious horror of the American exorcism genre and the gleeful silliness of Korean action cinema. The debut film from writer/director Lim Dae-hee, the project almost feels less like a movie than an elaborate pilot for a TV series, something along the lines of Evil, but with more punching.
The plot revolves around the apparent possession of a young woman whose sister, a neuropsychiatrist, begs the heroic trio for help. There are hints here of a possible skepticism toward the supernatural, but they’re as quickly banished as the anonymous bad guys who run into Ma’s beefy mitts. Instead, we’re whisked from one action scene to another, with flashbacks liberally thrown in to flesh out both the possession story and that of the three heroes. With these the film adopts a suitably creepy found footage approach, in contrast to the spectacular effects of the present-day exorcism scenes. The heroes’ story seems more designed to set up future episodes than is relevant to this movie, but the main plot remains satisfactory enough and the whole thing just flies by at barely 90 minutes long. The final result is plenty pleasing enough that no one should complain if more entries do eventually arrive.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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