Demon Dancer: Sua/Nara follows Sua (Jiyeon Han), a ballet dancer who we first meet as she's tied to a table and getting her fingers cut off. Luckily the man hurting her removes the tape from her mouth so she can summon the demon inside her, Nara, (Anita Korosi), and all is well. After fighting her way through some other demons, she and Nara relax in an elevator, and we find out how they ended up there. Sua's husband, whom she accidentally hit with her car, and may have been stalking her when they met, gets possessed by a demon, and she wants to find out who did it. So Nara possesses her, and after some training and some flashbacks and dreams, plus a cat that is kept for inordinate amounts of time in a small carrier, Sua is finally ready to take on the demons that cursed her husband. Is she up to the task?
I'll say! This is definitely a step up from Korosi's previous film. We have a great lead in Jiyeon Han, Anita Korosi was great as well as Nara, and then stunt coordinator Gui-Duck Kwon gives us some next-level stuff, especially in the opening and closing scenes. There are some issues though. Like with Anita Korosi, while she does great, there are some moments where it feels like it's not her playing her part. Part of it might be the make-up, but also, the voice is not hers, it's someone who's a native English speaker with an American accent. Was it AI? Nowadays you can't be sure. Same with some of the special effects. In one, Korosi is holding Jiyeon Han, but then when the effect makes her disappear, her hand stays behind on Jiyeon Han's face. There are some other inconsistencies like that, again, in the age of AI can be concerning, which you don't want to be concerned with when so much else in the film looks great. Finally, that poor cat who spends most of his time in a tiny cat carrier, also gets strangled by one of the baddies. It's a quick scene, but no cat should be treated like that ever. If you can use special effects to make other things in this film, use the effects to make a damn cat, it's not that hard. Cat mistreatment aside, this is an even better effort for Korosi than his previous film, we had two great leads and some fantastic martial arts, so it's worth checking out once it's available.
The best place to start is with the first lead, Jiyeon Han, because the whole thing hinges on her. There's a lot of stuff that she needs to sell in this, like the idea that when demons possess your soul they take it in the form of a hard boiled egg, but I did buy it from her. Beyond that, it was a very physically demanding role, sometimes she needed to do actual ballet, sometimes she needed to do ballet as if she was possessed by a demon, and again, I bought it every time. The power and grace she exuded is something you can't find everywhere, so to have it and see it in this film is fantastic. From here we have the other lead character, Nara, played by Anita Korosi, who is also doing a great job selling us on everything. We have to believe she's a demon, especially in the scenes when she's in her human form. It was a much bigger part than the one she had in Live and Die in LA, and she was more than up to it. And then she and Jiyeon Han had really great chemistry that brought the whole thing together. The martial arts action, which we'll talk about in the next paragraph, was fantastic, but if we didn't buy these two in their roles, it wouldn't have mattered.
That was pretty sweet martial arts action though. Unlike Live and Die in LA, where we had names like Robert LaSardo to sell the film, Korosi went a different route here, and instead of using a known actor in a small part, he went with a known stunt coordinator in Gui-Duck Kwon, and while I'm not sure if that name brings people in like having LaSardo on the tin does, it was money well-spent in terms of the finished product. According to the IMDb trivia, Korosi first heard of Gui-Duck Kwon when Chad Stahelski mentioned him on Joe Rogan's podcast, then went to Korea to convince him to be in his film. The bet paid off, because the film looks the part, and from there Korosi just needs people like me to get the word out because the cover doesn't have a name to sell it, which is easy enough--as long as they're not a cat lover like me, when the action's there the action sites are ready to sing its praises in the review. Going back to that opening sequence, if you stuck around after the fingers being chopped off, you were treated to something that rivals many big budget productions, it looked that great, and Jiyeon Han was there to pull it all off. Kudos to Korosi for bringing Gui-Duck Kwon on for this, the end result was worth it.
We do have to address the cat in the room, because after the last Korosi film, I was a little nervous when I saw he had a live cat enter the picture. I also should point out that this may be a more me issue than him, because I sampled some of the other reviews of this, and no one else seemed to have a problem with it. One made a comment on Jiyeon Han's English, which I thought was fine for what we were doing, so maybe it's a tomato/tomato thing, some people have trouble with cats being mistreated, others it's lead actors speaking English as a second language. And maybe that's it, it's a personal taste thing, but for me it's more about why we're doing it at all. Why did we even need the cat in the movie? It wasn't contributing anything, other than sitting in a tiny cat carrier, and then getting out once, and being strangled for a few seconds by the baddie before they cut away, but none of those were scenes the cat seemed to particularly want to be a part of. Again, going back to the fact that other reviewers didn't seem to care about this, maybe we can chalk it up to the Venn diagram of cat lovers and action movie lovers doesn't have much of an overlap, and I just happened to be the one poor schmuck who does love both.
Finally, you may not know this about me, but I almost went to Korea to teach English. I got my teaching certificate for English as a second language, and started applying to schools over there, but then met Jen around the same time, and decided to stick around the States and see how things went between us. We've been married over 12 years, so I guess it worked out. One thing I didn't know then that I learned subsequently, and that this film touched on, is the amount of jingoism in Korea. For example, there are bars that are for Koreans only, no foreigners allowed. Technically we have establishments that discriminate here too, it's just they can't overtly say "[X] only," it's more like you may go in and find out the hard way. Anyway, Korosi uses this jingoism as a plot point, as it's the driving factor of the baddie, he's cursing people in mixed marriages so they'll kill their Korean partner, then shrivel up and die themselves. It was a great added element to the story that gave it more depth.
And with that, let's wrap this up. It's looking like December of this year is when we'll see here in the States and in Europe. It's definitely worth a look, the martial arts is next level, and we have two great leads in Jiyeon Han and Anita Korosi--there's also a bit of an anime tinge to it that I couldn't appreciate, but you may enjoy as well. The cat mistreatment, I think you tread at your own risk, and maybe I'm just too sensitive.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30780374/
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