South Korea · Film · 2024
Badland Hunters
Synopsis
Three years after a massive earthquake reduces Seoul to a lawless wasteland, wasteland hunter Nam-san (Ma Dong-seok) and his younger partner Choi Ji-wan (Lee Jun-young) survive by trapping game and salvaging supplies for their small village. Their fragile routine collapses when Han Su-na (Roh Jeong-eui), a teenage girl from the village who lives with her ailing grandmother, is abducted along with other young people by men working for Yang Gi-su (Lee Hee-joon) — said to be the last surviving doctor in Seoul, who has fortified an apartment complex he calls a safe haven.
In reality, Gi-su is running illegal, often fatal experiments on the kidnapped teenagers in a desperate bid to revive his dead daughter and cheat death itself. Nam-san and Ji-wan team up with Lee Eun-ho (Ahn Ji-hye), a hardened special-forces sergeant with her own reasons to bring Gi-su down, and storm the complex to get Su-na out alive.
What follows is a near-continuous run of brutal hand-to-hand brawls, blade and firearm combat, and a chaotic siege of the apartment tower as the trio fights through Gi-su's guards and the results of his experiments. Gi-su is ultimately killed after his experiments spiral into tragedy, and the survivors make it back out — though the film is candid that not everyone who goes in comes out alive.
Directed by former stunt coordinator Heo Myeong-haeng in his feature debut, Badland Hunters is set in the same fictional universe as the 2023 disaster drama Concrete Utopia, but tells a self-contained story with no returning characters and no romantic subplot between its leads. Released globally on Netflix on January 26, 2024, it became the platform's number-one non-English film within days and stayed in Netflix's global top 10 for weeks.
Badland Hunters cast
Best scenes
- Nam-san's brawls: fighting with wrapped fists and improvised, machete-like weapons, "each punch sending enemies flying back" (But Why Tho?).
- Choi Ji-wan's bow combat in close quarters, called "electric to watch" by reviewers (But Why Tho?).
- Lee Eun-ho's extended solo action sequence — Ahn Ji-hye performs most of the stunts herself across long, largely uncut takes (But Why Tho?).
- The apartment-complex finale, where the high-rise itself becomes the arena for the climactic siege, escalating "bigger and louder" through each act (But Why Tho?; Ready Steady Cut).
Themes and messages
- Reviewers describe Badland Hunters as prioritizing adrenaline over exposition — where its shared-universe predecessor Concrete Utopia offered a colder, more layered disaster commentary, this film is a more straightforward, action-first survival story (Ready Steady Cut).
- The plot turns on what a father figure will do for family: Nam-san's rescue mission is driven by his bond with Su-na and her village, while villain Yang Gi-su's crimes are rooted in trying to bring back his own dead daughter.
- Gi-su's illegal human experimentation frames the film's central moral question around the ethics of cheating death at any human cost.
- Critics (Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus; Movie Nation) noted the film leans on a familiar post-apocalyptic survival template, but judged that its action choreography and star power carried the "recycled" premise.
Interesting facts
- Feature directorial debut for Heo Myeong-haeng, previously a stunt coordinator and martial arts director on films including Train to Busan (SCMP).
- Ma Dong-seok personally sought out Heo to direct the film from its earliest stages, and the two worked through each action set piece together before showing it to the rest of the team (SCMP).
- Badland Hunters marked Ma Dong-seok's first film as a Netflix original lead (Netflix Tudum).
- The film shares its post-apocalyptic Seoul setting with 2023's Concrete Utopia, but director Heo has said it "is not a sequel, it's a totally independent production with its own universe" (SCMP).
- It became Netflix's number-one non-English film worldwide within three days of release, reached the global top 10 in 89 countries, and logged 18.1 million views (32.9 million hours watched) in a single tracked week in early February 2024 (Korea Daily, citing Netflix's own Top 10 report).
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