[Review]: Cannibal Mukbang

Putting the meat into meet-cute is Aimee Kuge’s debut feature Cannibal Mukbang, in which the shy Mark falls quickly for the enigmatic Ash, who makes a living from filming mukbang videos for her audience. Unbeknownst to Mark however, is that Ash has an appetite for meat that isn’t sold at the local butchers.

Mark (played by Nate Wise) is a hopeless romantic, on the search for love when he randomly runs into Ash (played by April Consalo) in a supermarket and through a series of events, ends up back at her house. Ash is vivacious and confident, everything that Mark is attracted to, and soon reveals to him that she is a mukbang video creator, (ie) someone who eats large amounts of food on camera. But, it turns out, Ash is also a cannibal with a seemingly insatiable appetite for human meat, and she intends to pull Mark into her blood-soaked world, one bite at a time. 

With stylish and slick cinematography, Cannibal Mukbang is bringing the subgenre of cannibalism horror out of the dark annals of 70s exploitation cinema and into the modern light of day, with a social media spin centered around mukbangs – a trend of South Korean origins which involves a person eating a large amount of food whilst interacting with an audience. Director Kuge utilizes female protagonist Ash as an angel of revenge, a literal man-eater who chooses her victims based on how crappy of a human being they are. 

Mark and Ash’s relationship plays out in a similar way to 2009’s romantic drama 500 Days of Summer directed by Marc Webb. Mark imagines Ash as his ideal woman, and begins to become consumed by the manic pixie dream girl fantasy. Cannibal Mukbang explores a representation of what happens when the curtain is pulled back and it is revealed to men that women are more than a perfection fantasy and are actually three dimensional characters with bloody and vicious personality traits that exist alongside sweet and sexy facades. 

Cannibal Mukbang has a few moments of bloody action, however the film does fall heavy on the romantic side of this horror-romance, leaving audiences possibly hungry for more cannibalistic sequences. 

3 out of 5

Available to buy or rent on Apple TV, Google, YouTube and Amazon Prime