I just watched K-pop Demon Hunters (major spoilers!!!), and while a would love to say I loved it (because I did really enjoy watching the movie and there are many good things about it) the ending didn’t sit right with me.
Throughout the movie, they are setting up this message of redemption, not being defined by your past or parentage, and unity.
Rumi is constantly stressing to Jinu that he is more than the single mistake he made, that he deserves the chance to move past it and make a better life for himself. She discourages the self deprecating thoughts Gwi-Ma puts in his head. He is shown as a sympathetic character because all of his bad actions are a result of feeling as though actual redemption is impossible, so the only way to escape the torturous guilt is to repress it. This is paralleled to Rumi repressing her patterns instead of accepting them as part of her.
My problem with the movie starts with the fact that Jinu is considered the exception to the rule, instead of his existence being proof that there are more demons like him. They do not offer redemption to any of the other Saja boys, they kill them. They do not offer redemption to any of the demons in hell, they restore the barrier and trap them there forever. This is just another form of repression. This is continuing the harmful cycle that gave Gwi-Ma his power in the first place. He preys on desperate people, people who are experiencing depressive thoughts. This also undermines the message of unity (they are working throughout the movie to unify their fans, and the main conflict of the movie is when their unity as a band is almost destroyed). They literally establish a barrier, a Honmoon, between the ‘good ones’ (the ones not considered inherently less than due to either their genetics, which they have no control over, their mistakes, which they are often lead to due to poverty/desperation, or their mental illness (the ‘shame’ in my opinion represents depressive/anxiety/ocd related self deprecating thoughts)) and the ‘irredemables’, the others of society, the ones not worth the effort. This movie could have had a beautiful anti prison/capitol punishment message, showing that no one is undeserving of the effort or resources put in to help them, and expressing the systematic disadvantages that could lead people to being in that position. But instead they maintained the status quo and neatly tucked away all the ‘distasteful’ parts of society, exactly the same as the repression of Rumi’s patterns that the movie is faulting her for.
