I can honestly say I've never watched a movie that's combine MMA and exorcisms, but now I want to. But i was like Damn! Those sleepless demons 🤦🏼
It felt like a punch to the soul—equal parts faith, fury, and fear—and you can’t quite decide if it’s exorcising demons or dragging them out of you? That’s The Divine Fury. It’s the kind of film that grips you by the throat in the first ten minutes and doesn’t let go, not even after the credits roll. Because it’s not just about demons—it’s about the kind that live inside a man who’s lost faith, who’s angry at the world, at God, and at himself.
It starts with Yong-hoo, this fierce, emotionally burned MMA fighter whose life has been marked by loss. His father was a police officer, the kind of man who prayed before every meal, who wore faith like armor. But one night, that faith couldn’t save him. Yong-hoo watches his father die in front of him—bloody, helpless—and something inside him snaps. From that moment, he hates God. The prayers, the crosses, the idea of faith—it all becomes poison to him. He grows up hardened, built from muscle and rage, throwing punches not just at his opponents but at the heavens.
Then something strange--and frightening--occurs. His hands begin bleeding after one of his fights. Not as ordinary wounds, but like the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. It is a disturbing visual: this man who despises God now with His marks. I can tell, I shivered at that moment. He wants to deny it, to justify it, but it is not that which he can hide. That is when he sees Father Ahn, this old exorcist that is as composed as only people who have ever been in hell are.
Their encounter is one that is clumsy, strained as Yong-hoo does not believe in anything and Father Ahn does not believe in anything but faith. It is oil and sacred water fighting. However, when they go out to fight their first demon together, you get to see the fists of Yong-hoo, with which he was made to fight, literally glowing with godly power. He is beating the demons out of people, and his anger is sacrosanct. It’s wild. And poetic. Since the object that used to represent his hatred turns out to be his tool against evil.
The scene of exorcism in the dark alley was one of the scenes that never left me. The man they had, black-eyed, shaking body, curses of blasphemies--and Yong-hoo, trembling, furious, yet shaking to retreat. The demon makes fun of him by telling him that his father had died, and this was evidence that God had forsaken him. And you see it--all the pain that he is buried with, oozes up. It is not merely a fight scene when he delivers that last, radiant blow, but one in which he is smacking back at all the sorrow that has consumed him all these years.
However, the film does not remain in the realm of black and white good and evil. It has this simmer beneath it--the understanding that demons are not necessarily a monstrous thing beyond us. In some cases, they are a product of our anger, our conscience, our lack of faith. Yong-hoo does not fight Satan in the real sense, but it is a part of him that will not heal. And Father Ahn, that man, that man... He is a spiritual father figure to Yong-hoo who directs him back to the faith he has been struggling all his life.
Then the villain comes in- Ji-shin. Slick, charismatic, hollow eyed like the devil himself in designer clothes. He is a cult leader in the hood who lives on corruption and owning and survival on despair. Once Ji-shin and Yong-hoo finally get to meet, it is not power against power, but philosophy against rage, faith against nothingness. The last confrontation in that blood-red church? My God. Fire, crosses, holy water, flying in the air- it is all chaotic and heartbreakingly beautiful at the same time. Yong-hoo bled and trembled and screamed not with hate this time--but in submission.
That final fight has always been messing with me because of its symbolism. Since as Ji-shin collapses, you know that it is not winning, but getting free. Yong-hoo eventually ceases to be upset with God. It is not triumph, the tears, the weariness, the silent calm in his face. It’s redemption. The type which does not come easily, neatly, but with wounds which never heal quite.
My best part was that The Divine Fury did not preach. Neither did it attempt to convert you or preach to you about faith. It only demonstrated how faith can be horrifying and curative, how its loss may turn an individual upside down, and how his discovery may be like the fire which consumes him before it fades away and leaves him like the light.
When the movie ended, I sat in silence. Not the kind of silence where you scroll your phone after, but the kind that makes you question your own darkness. It made me think about how sometimes, the things that break us are the same things that can save us—if we stop fighting long enough to let them.
The Divine Fury isn’t just an action-horror flick—it’s an emotional exorcism. It’s fists and faith colliding, it’s pain transfigured into purpose. And it lingers. Because at the end of it all, it’s not really about God or demons—it’s about a man finally learning to forgive the only person he never could: himself.