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| Tale of Two Sisters, A |
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  (9/10)
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Runtime: 115 |
| Public Rating: 9.89 (838 votes) |
Director: Ji-woon Kim |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Horror/Mystery/Thriller |
Year: 2003 |
| Writer(s): Ji-woon Kim |
| Distributor: Asia Extreme/Tartan Films |
| Reviewed by: Mel Valentin |
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Loosely based on a Korean folktale (the basis for five other adaptations), A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon or "Rose Flower and Red Lotus"), written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Ji-woon Kim, is a psychological horror film both representative of the recent wave of Asian horror films and the rare film that, due to its narrative and thematic complexity, transcends the horror genre. A Tale of Two Sisters success depends on a multi-layered, hallucinatory narrative, unobtrusive direction, low-light cinematography, art and production design (i.e., the house is awash in dark recesses and floral patterns), and, ultimately, to the delicate, nuanced central performances.
A Tale of Two Sisters opens in a sterile, white walled interview room inside a hospital. A doctor is introduced to the audience fastidiously washing his hands, subtly signally the doctor’s concern with contamination. The doctor questions an obviously disturbed, uncommunicative, young woman. Ji-woon Kim unbalances the frame, pushing the table and the two characters into the right corner of the frame, the first of many, often subtle visual clues into the layered, nuanced plot. The narrative then unfolds as an embedded, extended flashback from the point-of-view of the central character, Su-mi (Su-jeong Lim), a fragile young woman returning home from the hospital with her younger sister, Su-yeon (Geun-yeong Mun), to a country estate owned by her father Bae Mu-hyeon (Kap-su Kim). Su-mi’s father responds impassively to her return, but her stepmother, Eun-ju (Jung-ah Yum), former nurse to Su-mi’s late mother, reacts with almost immediate resentment and hostility.
The conflict between the central character and her stepmother is archetypal (as indicated by the film's origin in a Korean folktale), with Su-mi’s father, Su-yeon, and the rapidly fading memories of Su-mi’s late mother held hostage to the rising animosity and hostility between Su-mi and her stepmother, who herself begins to display signs of psychosis. Su-yeon and the stepmother, however, have developed a kind of biological bond (their monthly cycles occur at the same time). Kim hints at a connection between menstruation, sexual awakening, and the ghostly manifestations (with obvious echoes to Stephen King's Carrie).
But there’s more at play here than a variation on the family drama. Su-mi’s traumatic experiences have uniquely made her the conduit (and perhaps cause) of a series of related, escalating encounters with enigmatic apparitions haunting the house (and Su-mi’s tortured dreams). In short, at play here is what psychoanalysts used to refer to as "the return of the repressed." A Tale of Two Sisters is primarily a hallucinatory exploration (almost clinical in its precision), of Su-mi’s deteriorating state of mind and consequently, the gradual manifestation of Su-mi’s abject fears and anxieties, literal and figurative, into her disintegrating family (and the house, which becomes alive with malevolent intent), reminiscent of The Innocents, an adaptation of Henry James’ novella, “The Turn of the Screw” (filmed and released in 1961 and directed by Jack Clayton). Su-mi's growing vulnerability to supernatural events becomes clear: a black-clad apparition appears to Su-mi in her bedroom as dawn arrives (the apparition's presence is first marked by a scratching sound, a sound that reverberates across the film, its meaning clear only at the denouement). Ji-woon Kim and his cinematographer Lee Mogae use minimal lighting for the interiors, to reflect Su-mi’s inner conflicts and to heighten the film’s scenes of psychological horror and existential dread (where apparitions can reveal themselves, day or night).
Ji-woon Kim asks the audience to sift through visual and narrative clues to decipher and differentiate between Su-mi’s subjective reality and the objective film depicted in the film. The audience, of course, is at an almost complete disadvantage from the beginning of the film, with the use of the framing device that bookends the film, the extended flashback, the first substantive clue for the audience. Ji-woon Kim also uses camerawork and editing (i.e., multiple point-of-view shots from Su-mi’s perspective) to both direct the audience to question their assumptions about the underlying, layered reality and to increase the level of identification with Su-mi as she re-enters her shattered world. Ji-woon Kim's approach to narrative structure certainly owes a great deal to European “art” films, i.e., the measured accretion of detail, including factual information about the characters, their backgrounds, and, often, the nature of their relationships (even then, sometimes ambiguously), to draw the audience into identification with the central character and into the skewed, defamiliarized world inhabited by the onscreen characters.
As this review suggests, A Tale of Two Sisters' narrative structure will certainly repay multiple viewings. Even then, the overall emotional impact of the denouement is unlikely to be diminished. Instead, viewers will American audiences who miss the original theatrically or on DVD will have the opportunity to revisit the material through the forthcoming DreamWorks forthcoming remake. More likely, however, A Tale of Two Sisters' narrative and structural complexity will be largely absent from the American remake.
© Mel Valentin, 1st December, 2004
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