I don’t know much about South Korea, but there are two things I do know. First, they have arguably the most robust online infrastructure on the planet, with speeds and coverage that are vastly cheaper and leagues more advanced than anything in the USA. Second, they are a highly vain culture, with eating disorders and plastic surgery both pervasive enough to make Los Angeles blush.

It makes sense that a nation so thoroughly steeped in online culture would be superbly capable of spreading media worldwide, connecting an international fanbase, and waging online flame wars to shut down any naysayers. And in pop music — a genre that famously rewards razzle-dazzle and sex appeal over creativity, talent, and artistic merit — such a vain and superficial culture as South Korea would have an inherent advantage. Thus we have the ongoing global spread of K-Pop.

I’ve done my best to avoid K-Pop for the above-stated reasons, but there comes a point of saturation beyond the most devoted holdout. For me, the tipping point came a few months ago, when I discovered APT. by Rose and Bruno Mars. When I found a live performance with the Korean rapper Psy (Remember him?), I knew this had to be the Song of the Summer in a year when American pop charts have long suffered a drought of new material.

So here we are with K-Pop Demon Hunters, a movie that quickly became an all-consuming sensation, most especially in households with young kids. The film was distributed by Netflix, by way of Sony Pictures Animation and co-director/co-writer Maggie Kang. Having given up on Netflix some time ago, I had written this one off as a film I wouldn’t get to review. But then I found a screening at a local second-run theater. Who needs a Netflix subscription anyway?

In this movie’s lore, demons prey on human souls by way of manipulating shame, insecurity, anger, fear, despair, and other such dark emotions. Thus demons aren’t just a physical threat, but also a spiritual threat. In turn, this means several generations of demon hunters who don’t just fight off monsters with magic weapons and martial arts, but also play defense by encouraging hope and happiness through music. This defense is manifested in the Honmoon, a kind of global magical force field that keeps the demons in their hellscape, while a trio of demon hunters maintains the Honmoon and kills off any demons that slip through the cracks.

Put simply, the filmmakers have devised a premise that uses demon hunting as a metaphor for show business. Our protagonists aren’t just working themselves into the ground, performing and recording and promoting and obsessively fine-tuning every song for fame or fortune, or even for the love of music or their fans. They’re interested in all of the above because the fate of the world literally depends on their success. The filmmakers took a standard plot about a girl band struggling to stay together and maintain chart dominance, and used an urban fantasy setting to bring global life-or-death stakes. Impressive.

In the modern day, the current demon hunters are Huntr/x (Gods above, I cringed so hard spelling it like that.), a K-Pop band at the top of their game. We’ve got Mira (May Hong), the dancer and visual artist, known for being a gruff and standoffish black sheep. There’s Zoey (Ji-young Yoo), the American-raised rapper and lyricist with a joyful effervescent energy. And then there’s Rumi (Arden Cho), our proactive and practical protagonist and lead singer of the group. She’s by far the most career-motivated and focused on driving off demons, in large part because she’s trying to purge the part of her that’s secretly half-demon. We’ll come back to that.

Anyway, the plot kicks off when the demons decide to try something new and beat Huntr/x (Seriously, I hope you can feel me cringe every time I type that insipid slash.) at their own game. Thus we have the Saja Boys, a K-Pop boy band of demons posing as humans, sabotaging Huntr/x and the Honmoon by drawing away their fans. There are five Saja Boys, but the only one worth mentioning is their frontman (Jinu, voiced by Ahn Hyo-Seop).

Rounding out the cast, we’ve got Bobby (Ken Jeong), the oblivious agent and manager of Huntr/x. His comic relief schtick is nicely balanced out by Celine (Yunjin Kim), a former demon hunter who mentors the current crew. Unfortunately, for all her good intentions, Celine fucked up big time when it came to training Rumi and insisting that she hide her demi-demonic past. It’s a powerful moment in the third act when Rumi and Celine finally have to reckon with that, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

No doubt about it, the film is aggressively silly at the outset. It’s heavily stylized, hyperactive, loud, twee, saccharine, and over-the-top nonsensical in a way that’s exclusively tailored to K-Pop sensibility. The style will likely drive away anyone who isn’t already a fan. But then the plot unfolds, the themes develop, and the characters — most especially Jinu and Rumi — start asking questions about themselves and their respective predicaments. And that’s when the film really gets going.

See, Jinu has his own tragic backstory, from when he was a human with his own regrettable reasons for selling his soul and becoming a demon. As for Rumi, she was trained from birth to hide who and what she truly is, deathly afraid that her teammates and the entire world would reject her or worse if they ever found out. Thus the two of them interact in such a way that leads Jinu to question his demon side and Rumi to question her hunter side. It’s a genuinely fascinating love/hate dynamic they’ve got going on once it finally picks up. And what’s even better is how this internal conflict impacts their music and their respective bands.

Remember, the demons in this film are a metaphor for shame, guilt, anger, insecurities, etc. And both of our romantic leads cover up the markings that make them demonic. Hell, the Honmoon itself — the force field that our hunters were trained to spend their lives maintaining — is effectively a giant blanket to cover up the demons so everyone can deny their existence without ever acknowledging them or dealing with them long-term.

So yes, what we’ve got here is another kid’s movie about confronting and managing dark emotions, rather than denying and hiding them. This is hardly the first time we’ve seen such a film in recent memory. Hell, it’s not even the first animated kid’s film we’ve recently seen on the topic that was also Asian-themed, urban fantasy, and featuring a heartthrob pop music band (Turning Red, anyone?).

Even so, these are characters uniquely equipped for taking all that personal inner turmoil and expressing it through music in ways that directly impact the plot. Even better, because the antagonists are shapeshifters who are every bit as adept at the use of music, they can take the intimate and emotional nature of art — not to mention the public and highly delicate nature of life and work as a celebrity — and turn it back on our protagonists in surprising and powerful ways. It’s freaking ingenious.

The film has its aggressively hyperactive K-Pop stylings, but it also has a strong beating heart. And in those moments when the style and the substance bolster each other, that’s when the movie fires on all cylinders and it’s a sight to behold. There are some musical numbers here — most especially in that third act — that are outright transcendent because the themes, the character drama, the music, and the visuals all interweave perfectly.

K-Pop Demon Hunters is undeniably silly, but at least it commits to the tone without apology. When the film is at its weakest, it’s still amusing. When the film is at its strongest, it’s jaw-dropping and deeply empowering cinema. And we’ve got powerful chemistry — between the romantic leads and between the three bandmates — to keep the plot compelling and the themes engaging from start to finish.

This was a pleasant surprise and I wasn’t expecting this film to be anywhere near as good as it was. But I totally get the hype. If you’re a K-Pop fan, you should already have seen this. Even if you’re not, take a chance and check it out.