A Tale of Two Sisters

I usually go to great pains in these reviews to avoid major spoilers. I far prefer going into films completely cold to knowing everything that happens, even if it's just the action of the first 15 or 20 minutes. The way I see it, movies are designed in a certain way, and when you know too much going in, you cheat yourself of seeing the story develop the way the filmmaker intended.

But I'm going to go ahead and give away a major spoiler for the 2003 Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters. There's just no way to give you my impression of the film without revealing something about it, and I don't think your enjoyment of the movie would be terrifically hampered to know this detail. But, I'll give anyone a chance to get away now if they don't want to know something big about the plot of Ji-woon Kim's Polanski-esque melodramatic thriller.

Okay? Still there? Let's get started...

A Tale of Two Sisters employs the most silly, overused horror film switcheroo twist of our time. One or more of the characters we meet in the film are actually figments in the imagination of another character. Eventually, we come to see the "reality" of the situation, and realize that events we viewed "objectively" were actually representations of the point of view of a delusional nutjob.

Usually, the use of this cliche would be enough to turn me off to a movie completely. Since The Sixth Sense and Fight Club, I've honestly had no more patience for it. But, like a lot of worthwhile horror movies, A Tale of Two Sisters is much more about getting you to the twist than the payoff itself. And it's hard to deny the simple pleasures of Kim's ghost story, a stylish and creepy haunted house movie that riffs on the genre better than most recent horror films. In a Hollywood season that includes such non-entities as The Amityville Horror and House of Wax, A Tale of Two Sisters offers up a satisfying, if not completely original, alternative.



I really dig the vagueness of a lot of Asian horror films. They seem to intuitively understand that true fear derives from the unknown, so they keep the true nature of their narratives unclear and give the story time to develop. American horror films are always overanxious to explain everything to the audience, usually in an early expository sequence that can be spliced easily into a trailer...("Are you telling me that this ship is alive?!?" Something like that.)

Nothing about A Tale of Two Sisters gets quickly explained in this manner. We meet the titular siblings (Su-jeong Lim and Geun-yeong Mun) as they arrive home from a mental hospital. They are greeted by their cold and distant father (Kap-su Kim) and disgruntled, vaguely psychotic stepmother (Jung-ah Yum, in a startlingly freaky turn). Soon enough, it becomes clear that something is not right in their house.

And that's about it for storyline. Kim clearly takes a page from the Polanski book during the film's initial hour, giving the girls' living quarters an eerie sense of disquiet, a kind of indistinct menace that can't quite be put into words. By the time some standard Japanese ghosts show up (corpse-like girls with hair covering their pained, distorted faces), and stepmom starts to freak out in a directly violent manner, we've basically already been sold on the house's sinister nature. Just get the hell out of there, I found myself thinking. But, of course, these are young girls we're talking about here, who lack the ability to simply pick up and leave.

This, I think, is central to Kim's thematic conception of his story. It's about the lingering horror of a violent act and how it reverberates through a family's life, how its memory remains in their house even after the evidence has been cleared and removed. But it's also about the "horror" of female adolescence. Like Brian Da Palma's Carrie, there's a scene directly tying female menstruation to blood-soaked violence. And the bond between the two sisters, much like the bond between the two girls of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, is simultaneously life-affirming and creepy.

So, there's enough going on in the movie to compensate for a kind of throwaway, generic "explanation" of the film's events. The late revelation about who's alive, who's dead and who's insane leads to a rather bewildering, stacatto series of flashbacks that both explain the riddles of the film and enhance the confusion about the backstory. Though we get a sense for what violent event triggered the horrific aftermath that takes up the bulk of the film, we're never sure exactly what brought it on, , and who exactly did what to whom.

I suspect this was intentional. As I stated above, much of the success of the film in terms of shock value comes from its blurry, indistinct edges. There's always something unsettling going on, and that's really all that needs to be known.

Mainly, the effect is accomplished through the remarkable, shadowy cinematography of Mo-gae Lee. The film takes place almost entirely within the girls' large seaside home, and Lee finds new and interesting ways to present the underlit manse in nearly every scene. His use of darkness and shadows is particularly effective. The girls pad down long hallways almost completely obscured by darkness, the white of their nightgowns giving them the effect of floating weightlessly across the floor. In some scenes, Lee and Kim light only a small corner of a room, giving the audience an intense feeling of claustrophobic terror.

And finally, I must mention a single shot, in which the villainous stepmother stands perfectly rigid, in a state of complete shock, in a dark room lit only by a small green light. It's almost a night-vision effect, but not quite, and the soft green light makes only the contours of her face and her eyeballs visible to the camera. It's one of the most creepy, strange, other-worldly shots I've seen in a movie in some time. I actually paused the DVD at this point just to get a better look at the mesmerizing effect.

Really, that's good enough for me. A movie that looks this good, that has this many cool little scares and twisted scenes of gore more than satisfies my cinematic bloodlust. It's not even close to perfect, and may be a bit too twisty and confusing for some filmgoers, but I can't imagine a horror fan or a fan of the new Korean cinema being disappointed by A Tale of Two Sisters. It doesn't do anything terribly new for the horror genre, but what it does, it does exceptionally well.