I gotta love fanatical religious movies at times. It’s one of the easiest ways to trigger viewers, whether they themselves are religious or not. But a Korean fanatical religious movie at that? Yes, sign me up day one. Revelations was just released on Netflix on March 21, 2025, and I immediately jumped on it. It’s not perfect, but it serves to once again highlight how, regardless of race or location, religion can be used as an excuse to serve one’s purpose. A seemingly mild-mannered priest can instantly turn into a fanatical zealot in the blink of an eye to justify his actions, good or otherwise.

It’s not that Revelations was a bad movie, but rather, I thought they could have played it a lot smarter. In these typical types of movies where crime is involved and where the criminal and detective meet with each other, I usually link it to some type of cat-and-mouse game between the two. You know, they meet each other for the first time, have some witty conversation, the detective gets just a little suspicious, who later finds clues or evidence pointing to the suspect, confronts him/her, but they are able to cunningly dodge and evade all questions, and around and around they go. With Revelations, we don’t really get that between the priest, played by Ryu Jun-yeol, and the detective, played by Shin Hyeon-bin. I’d say the priest outshines the detective in this one as far as acting is concerned. Both were fairly average in the beginning, but the priest pulled ahead towards the second half and did a pretty decent job fitting into the stereotypical vision-seeing zealot priest. In addition, Shin Min-jae did great portraying the kidnapper.

Well, I did learn something important. For all the movies we see about people seeing things and perceiving those random sights as more meaningful than they are, I don’t remember an actual term being used in the movie for this phenomenon. Well, it’s called apophenia. Anyway, Revelations is an okay movie. I don’t think you’ll miss out on anything by not watching it, but if you’re craving an Asian religious crime thriller, definitely go for it.