HOLY NIGHT: DEMON HUNTERS -- Korean Action-Horror Punches Below Weight

Review by Daniel Lima

Ma Dong-seok has carved out a niche for himself in the media ecosystem of today. Or rather, he has caved in a niche using devastating haymakers. The hulking South Korean actor has proven to be one of the best wrecking ball leads of action cinema, able to swagger into any scene and take control with sheer force of charisma, even before he starts letting his fists do the talking. Holy Night: Demon Hunters seems like it should be fun, as if there’s one man who might be able to punch out physical embodiments of evil, it’s this one. Sadly, it doesn’t fully capitalize on its greatest assets.

The film sees him leading a team of — wouldn’t you know it — demon hunters, who use their own supernatural abilities and knowledge to stave off the forces of darkness in a Seoul where demonic possession is on the rise. The case before them seems to be run-of-the-mill, a young woman who seems lost to a diabolic entity, but they find themselves against an adversary more powerful than they had imagined.

Despite all the copious worldbuilding and flashbacks, this is neither an adaptation nor part of a series, though I imagine it’s intended to launch one. The cosmology borrows heavily from Catholicism — priests, exorcisms, Biblical demons — but also incorporates elements drawn from Korean folk traditions. Much is implied about the characters’ pasts and the structure of the supernatural world, though little of it is solidly defined. Given the amount of time spent on this, it leads to a world that feels rather slight and threadbare. It’s one thing for the nature of the threat being faced to be amorphous, quite another for who your protagonists actually are as people to be left up in the air.

This follows the basic structure of Western exorcism stories, to its own detriment. You know the drill: team goes to investigate strange behavior of innocent girl, girl gets chained up as they attempt to thwart the possession, supernatural antics ensue. Perhaps old chestnuts like crawling on the wall, flinging furniture around the room, and speaking in tongues are novel in Korea, but it all feels rather perfunctory. The most interesting aspects of the horror are those that seem rooted in Korean tradition, but that makes up only a fraction of what is shown. It is immediately evident what path the film will take, and it doesn’t deviate from that.

Had the characters been fun to hang around, that wouldn’t be so much of an issue. Unfortunately, there are no real characters here, only archetypes: the possessed, the harried woman who wants her sister back to normal, the comic relief, the priest. So much time is spent on either the procedural elements or the lore that defining these people through how they interact with each other is an afterthought, and the brief moments that they do spend time together feel forced. No performance can truly shine with the lackluster material that they’re working with, but Ma remains a credible physical presence and can play the confident muscle man in his sleep.

One of the few swings that Holy Night takes is combining its very traditional narrative with a found footage aesthetic. A good portion of the possession and exorcism is captured via security cameras and the comic relief character who films the proceedings (and little else), and those deviations are the closest the film comes to being actually scary. Of course, found footage films use the visual language that fills everyday life in order to lend a sense of realism and immediacy to what is unreal. Marrying this approach to a regular film inherently blunts its power, and swapping between the two visual styles ends up feeling jarring.

The saving grace of the movie is ultimately what would inevitably draw most people to it: Ma Dong-seok punching demons. There are only a handful of fight scenes, but there are few things more satisfying than watching Ma put his boxing background to good use. Every fight between him and diabolically empowered cultists sees him ducking and weaving and throwing body blows that send people flying through the air. It’s a testament to how perfectly he nails the choreography that for most of the film, I didn’t even realize his character had superpowers himself. I was willing to believe he could just do that.

As fun as these are, they still amount to fights on an even plane, with enemies attacking Ma one by one, only for him to dispatch them with a single blow. Had there been an attempt to incorporate the environment more, to vary the kinds of demons he was up against, to make one fight feel different from the last, it would have been easy enough to overlook the lack of ingenuity in the rest of the film. At the very least, there could have simply been more of them, as the action is far more effective than the horror.

Holy Night: Demon Hunters is not an auspicious start to a media franchise. Had it either focused more on the folk horror elements than generic Christian-themed exorcism shenanigans, or leaned into Ma Dong-seok’s abilities and took more care with the action, this could have been something special. The haymakers go a long way in making this worth a watch for some, but if sequels come from this, they will hopefully double down on the best aspects.

Holy Night: Demon Hunters is in theaters May 2.

Rating: 2.5/5