Cannibal Mukbang (2025)
Directed & Written by Aimee Kuge
Starring April Consalo, Nate Wise, & Clay von Carlowitz.

Horror

★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SPOILERS!
You’ve been warned.

Aimee Kuge’s delightfully and gruesomely named Cannibal Mukbang is the story of Ash (April Consalo), an online influencer who does mukbangs, as she not only looks for revenge against terrible men, she looks for love. When Ash meets Mark (Nate Wise) after an unfortunate accident, they’re drawn to each other. Even after Mark discovers Ash’s bloody little secret, he still seems to fall for her, even harder. Once things hit close to home for Mark, he has to decide where his loyalty lies, or else face a terrible fate.

What would you do for love, and when do you reach that threshold? In the end, this is the main question Cannibal Mukbang seems to ask. The film also, in the final moments, questions what matters more: love or morality. Morality is a funny thing to be talking about in relation to a film that depicts an almost gleeful cannibalism; however, there are, indeed, things worse than eating human flesh. Although there are morsels of Cannibal Mukbang that don’t quite satisfy the cinematic gut, Kuge’s film remains bold and unflinching, using mukbang popularity as a launching pad for its horror. Hard not to dig a film that wears its appetites on its sleeve and smeared across its face.
Often the primary trouble of a cannibal or vampire with a heart is their need to find a food/blood source that comes without the moral wound of having to kill an innocent person. Ash’s quest to murder and consume only the bad men kills two birds with one stone, at once keeping her cannibal urge at bay and not killing innocent people to feed that urge. Plus, her cannibal hunger has roots in personal tragedy; a trauma that keeps on rumbling in the stomach. On top of that, she uses at least some of that human meat as food for her mukbang videos. She clearly has a following, so likely monetises her videos. All that free meat would result in a great profit margin! Ash clearly knows how to game the system. Not just that, she knows how all the systems in our society work, from capitalism to the cops. Ash tells Mark she only kills those “society could do without” and lists people from Ted Bundy and Rodney Alcala to Earl Bradley and Jeffrey Epstein. She kills the “not so famous guys” who “get away with doing horrible things to innocent people scot–free.” When Mark asks “Isn‘t that what the police are for?” he gets the most fitting reply from Ash: “Don‘t be silly.” And ultimately when we see the conflict Mark winds up in later, we come to see that while Ash understands the systems that make the world turn—capitalism and patriarchy most of all—Mark remains blind to the destructive imbalances of power at work in the world, even when they’re part of his own family tree.

The strongest piece of Cannibal Mukbang involves how many people give too much when in love with another person, oftentimes to their own detriment. Mark falls so hard for Ash that he starts to lose himself, but, most significantly, the final scenes reveal that Mark has pledged himself so deeply to his brother that he’s become blind to the patriarchal evil his own brother comes to represent. At one point, Mark has a hallucinatory dream about Ash: he’s watching Ash do a mukbang video, then she comes up from underneath his covers; he sees Ash sitting on a throne being doted on by servants, cooled by men with large feathers, as she berates him for not bringing enough of a tribute for her, and so she hands him a knife; Mark says: “I’d give any part of myself for you master” then cuts off his nose (to spite his face!). This dream alone reveals just how deeply Mark is falling for Ash, and how far he’s unconsciously ready to go to gain her love. The ugliness of Mark’s tendency to give too much love comes to a head with his brother, Maverick (Clay von Carlowitz). When Mark confronts Maverick about whether the latter has ever raped somebody, his brother says: “Depends on how you define rape.” Not even making an attempt at denial, or feigning guilt. Mark goes a step further, questioning whether Maverick’s ever killed. His big brother avoids the question, playing the “flesh and blood” card before calling Ash an “e–whore” and insulting Mark. Somehow, even after all this, Mark tries to save his brother, though the consequences are surely beyond what he imagined would happen, especially after he and Ash fell so hard in love together.
The brutal, tragic ending of Cannibal Mukbang makes the bold statement that certain things, like truly unconditional morality, are more important than love. Ash’s choice and its result for Mark is one that we feel the weight, as Ash cradles Mark, kissing and hugging him, apologising for what she had to do in the film’s final moments. As wild as it gets during the finale, Ash’s actions are those of a woman unwilling to allow any bad men and anyone that knows of their badness to go without punishment. In a day and age when it seems that horrific men like Jeffrey Epstein, Diddy, and too many more will never actually be held accountable for the human misery and collateral damage they leave behind in their wake, Cannibal Mukbang refuses to let bad men and the equally shitty men adjacent to them off the hook—as it should be, in film and in the streets.