What a view | Taiwanese drama The Devil Punisher finds love and martial arts in the sprit world
- The lighthearted Netflix fantasy series stars Mike He, Ivy Shao and Amanda Chou
- Flitting between the human and supernatural worlds, the heroes use smartphones to suck up evil spirits
Spirits are cavorting in the material world again. This time they’re running around Taipei trying to round up rogue ghosts, when not hanging about on the “other side” and exploding into a fog of black smoke.
The Devil Punisher (Netflix, series one now streaming, with a new episode every Monday), is a lighthearted romp through the realms of the comedic supernatural, with some expertly choreographed martial arts thrown in. But no matter the dimension in which our heroes move, love will always find a way to mess things up.
Looking pretty good for his age, the 1,000-year-old Zhong Kui (Mike He), is the Ghost King, who slips into the human sphere to try to rescue the abducted Meng Po (Ivy Shao). At what resembles an over-polished perfume counter, Wu Ching-yuan, an evil spirit who resembles a washed-out Johnny Depp, is being processed by the administrative gofers working for the formidable Underworld Queen (Amanda Chou). Taking advantage of a badly timed girl-on-girl physical confrontation, Wu kidnaps Meng Po and transports her back to the human realm, where, known as Hsin-yu, she has no memory of her past.
Now this is unfortunate, because it transpires that, in the spirit world, Meng Po was known as Lady Meng, dispenser of Oblivion Soup, an elixir concocted to expunge all pain and bile lingering from spirits’ experiences on Earth. At the supernatural perfume counter, Lady Meng had a “thing” going with Zhong Kui – but on terra firma she doesn’t recognise him and frankly thinks he’s a bit of a weirdo. Romance, eh?
“Devil punisher” sounds like a dangerous job at the best of times, and this being a tale with its roots in Chinese folklore, Zhong Kui doesn’t have it easy. While scrabbling around for ways to convince his love interest that he’s not some smooth-talking confidence trickster, he also has to fend off Wu and his agents of chaos.
But good may yet prevail. In the human realm, Zhong Kui’s three-strong ghost clean-up team has a secret weapon: when the wind is blowing in the right direction, evil spirits, having been zapped into clouds of vapour, can be vacuumed up into mobile phones and held prisoner therein. This is a function definitely worth exploring by app developers everywhere.