Written and directed by Kim Jee-Woon. Starring Kap-su Kim (Bae Moo-hyeon), Jung-ah Yum (Eun-joo), Su-jeong Lim (Bae Soo-mi), Geun-Young Moon (Bae Soo-yeon).
Bottom line: A Tale of Two Sisters is wonderfully chilling and offers more than a creepy premise which makes it a powerful cinematic experience.
3.5/4
The movie opens to a sterile mental hospital examination room. A girl sits in a chair opposite a doctor. He asks several questions which she ignores. He shows her a picture of her family. He asks, “What happened that day?” She raises her head and looks out the window. The camera fades to a shot looking out the back passenger window of a car as it drives through the forest, over a bridge and along a lake. Peacefully sad guitar/violin music plays as the car approaches an imposing house.
The opening shots juxtapose the ominous house with peaceful music. The intersection of scary images and not scary music isn’t new, Insidious, for example, plays Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Though the Tulips” but I don’t think this is what A Tale of Two Sisters is attempting. In some movies, we know that what we are watching a retelling of an event. The movie then becomes a something like a campfire ghost story. A Tale of Two Sisters presents the events after the fact but as a ‘story’ instead of a ‘ghost story’.
I have said time and time again that I hate horror movies. Even if they are of poor quality, I can never sleep after watching them. At the same time, I loved A Tale of Two Sisters. I loved it so much it makes me rethink my relationship with horror. I was genuinely scared during portions of the movie and yet, I slept soundly that night. As I write this, I smile because it was such a fun experience. I will go into more detail below but I hesitate to tell you much more because I did have fun trying to anticipate the story. Let us discuss a scene, the stepmother’s introduction, in the hopes of describing why A Tale of Two Sisters is so brilliant.
The two sisters, holding hands, timidly enter the large, silent, dimly lit house. Cutting the silence, we hear the stepmother saying, “Welcome home!” The camera cuts to a long shot of a long, dark hallway. The stepmother approaches the still camera. She speaks quickly and walks so smoothly it looks like she is floating instead of walking. The suddenness of her presence makes you want to recoil but the still camera prevents the reaction. Standing firm, the sensation of helplessness prolongs until we cut to her point of view. The two girls watch her (looking into the camera) and tense up. The collision of her swiftness and the previous still camera prolongs the sense of lack of control because even though we are moving we are not in control. Sure, we are never in control of the camera but we don’t usually realize it.
I’d like to discuss this movie a little bit more but in doing so will give away the plot so beware of spoilers. The movie begins with the framing device of Soo-Mi’s recollection. She is in a mental hospital so she becomes an unreliable narrator. We do learn the actual series of events at the end of the movie though. The father arrives at the home with his coworker, Eun-joo (with whom he was having an affair and who will soon be called stepmother). Soo-yeon takes a nap but wakes when she hears a noise in her wardrobe. She investigates and discovers the suicidal mother’s hanging dead body. She panics and causes the wardrobe to fall on her. Eun-joo hears a noise from downstairs. She sees the wardrobe, hears the scratching nails of suffocating Soo-yeon. Eun-joo runs out of the room catches her breath and composes herself. Before she can return, she is delayed by Soo-mi who spits with disdain and contempt. The delay is enough to prevent the rescue of Soo-yeon. It becomes clear that Soo-mi is guilt ridden to the point of insanity. To cope, she constructs a fabricated reality. As the film alternates between memory and reality, all through the lens of Soo-mi’s memory, it positions the audience in a sympathetic position. The geometric structure of the cinematography is a powerful way to further the sensation that this is a construct of Soo-mi’s mind; she outlines the details of the scene in a methodical pattern. Similarly, during an encounter with the ghostlike images, the audio’s fuzziness mimics Soo-mi’s mental fog.
The ghastly visions exist because Soo-mi can neither address nor repress reality. This traumatic experience mixes with other stressful circumstances in Soo-mi’s life: confusion with her parents’ broken marriage, fear of Eun-joo trying to replace her biological mother and reaching physical maturation.
During the dinner sequence, Eun-joo recalls a story of a “crazy man” who would take off his clothes whenever it rained, “The funny thing is that he was usually normal, but whenever it rained, he went nuts.” The man is as normal as Soo-mi and, as a result, as the audience. If we tried to suppress a similar trauma, we too would suffer the Soo-mi’s plight.
A Tale of Two Sisters is on top of its game. The music, cinematography and acting harmonize to make a complete experience that I highly recommend. The quality of the movie, rather than cheap scares, leaves a lasting impression. I’ve heard people liken horror movies to a roller coaster ride. The emphasis of the analogy is that horror movies thrive on cheap thrills and that the audience doesn’t anticipate what is happening next. I disagree with the analogy but let’s expand it a little. A roller coaster takes you for a ride but it brings you back to where you started. A typical horror movie, for me, is like driving off-road through the woods. It is bumpy and maybe exciting but when all is said and done, the driver (the movie) leaves you in the scary woods alone. I leave the theater with nightmares and paranoia. A Tale of Two Sisters is actually like a roller coaster ride because it takes you into a frightening situation but brings you back; the movie positions itself and the audience together in a discussion that is more complex than ‘a murdered child-ghost wants revenge.’ I’ve seen it twice so far and look forward to seeing it again.
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