🎬 Movie Review: The Divine Fury (사자)

Ne sono sicuro. Il Vescovo Nero è a Seoul.

(I'm sure of it. The Black Bishop is in Seoul.) 

MMA champion Yong Hoo not only doesn't believe in God but gets mad-angry anytime he sees a cross...when he was just a child, Yong Hoo's father got injured while on patrol and even after praying God to save him, his dad died. This is the reason why he resents God so much and with such a grudge.
On his flight back to South Korea, Yong Hoo has a nightmare and when he wakes up he has a strange mark on the palm of his hand; from that moment on he won't be able to have peaceful dreams due to the pain so, after doctors say he's healthy, he reluctantly visits a priest after a fortune teller said so.

Priest An arrived directly from Vatican City because of some odd cases of evil possession in Seoul and it doesn't take long for him to understand that a powerful and demoniac entity known as the 'Black Bishop' is in the city. The problem is that the victims of these possessions gain physical strength from the devil and the priest that's with him, Priest Choi, can't deal with it.

After knocking down a possessed man, Yong Hoo decides to help the priest and by doing so he'll also uncover the truth about his dad's accident.

My Opinion👍👎

Before I decided to watch 'The Divine Fury' I read some interviews with the protagonists and they assured me it was NOT a horror movie. Well, that was a half-lie because let's face it, the first half of the movie is textbook horror while the end felt like I was watching an Avengers movie...
I watched a few horror movies in my life and in this one, likewise the others, I'm mind blown by how believable the possessed are! Seriously, people playing them are so credible and scary, they gave me serious goosebumps. And don't even get me started with the child actors...Superb!

That aside, the acting here isn't great or, to be more precise, it's very good in some scene while they fall low in others, especially SPOILER the final battle, which is supposed to be the climax of the story, it didn't give me nothing.

The base story is the never-ending 'good versus evil' one, yet the movie has some uniques aspects which made the overall plot original: for example, I liked the idea of a person who genuinely hates anything related to God helping a priest by beating (literally) the devil out of humans.
While at first, I thought it was a bit of blasphemy to have stigmata appear on Yong Hoo's hand, I quickly changed my mind when I saw it combined with the holy water.

If I have to be completely honest, I watched the movie mainly because of actor Woo Do-Hwan: besides his obvious beauty, he doesn't have that much screen time or lines, still, he's captive and creepy in the role of the Black Bishop.

I'd probably recommend it to people who like the mix between religious aspects set in modern days and to those who like being scared, but not at the point you won't be able to sleep!

Related Movies

The Exorcist series (starting from 1973)
The Rite (2011)
Deliver Us from Evil (2014)

Rating: 2½/5


Ph: asianwiki.com