Although his ‘The Foul King’ (2000) remained in number one position at South Korea’s box office for a staggering six months, outside of the festival circuit director/screenwriter Kim Jee-woon seems destined to become best-known in the west not for his own films, but for other people’s remakes of them. Although, for example, his excellent black comedy ‘The Quiet Family’ (1998) is seldom seen, it was the main source of inspiration for Takashi Miike’s madcap musical ‘The Happiness of the Katakuris’ (2002) – and while his ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’ is unlikely to screen for long (if at all) in your average British or American cineplex, the English-language remake by Dreamworks, scheduled to begin production in mid-2004, will soon no doubt prove as popular with horror-fans as the Hollywood reworkings of recent Asian horror successes Ringu, The Eye and Ju-on: the Grudge.
Yet it would be a mistake to miss Kim Jee-woon’s original, for even if its story, despite its many reality-checking surprises, is hardly original (drawing, after all, on both a traditional Korean folk tale as well as other horror films from The Shining to The Sixth Sense and The Others), its plush, textured visual style, showing the sort of opulent sensibility normally associated with the works of Wong Kar-Wai (‘In the Mood for Love’, ‘2046’), is something without parallel in horror cinema – and will no doubt be largely lost in its American translation. Put simply, supernatural tragedy has never before dripped with such languid sumptuousness, and the haunted house in ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’, with its echoing wooden floors, floral wallpaper and white linens, may be the setting for a family’s nightmare, but it is also a designer’s dream.
Two sisters, Su-Mi (Im Soo-jung) and Su-Yeon (Moon Geun-young), have been deeply traumatised by the circumstances of their mother’s death. After a long stay in an institution, they return to the country-house of their father (Kim Kab-su) and his new wife Eun-joo (Yeom Jeong-a). The shy Su-yeon is terrified by footsteps that she hears approaching her bed at night, Su-mi is convinced that her younger sister is being beaten and tormented by their stepmother, while the pill-popping Eun-joo’s behaviour becomes more and more neurotic and aggressive. In this atmosphere of heated female hysteria, a fifth presence in the house is making itself felt, forcing the family’s dark secrets out of the closet.
For all the apparent simplicity of its premise, ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’ has more twists than a sixties dance floor, so that seemingly innocuous questions – who does the father keep calling on the telephone? why is Eun-Joo on medication? why does her menstrual cycle coincide with Su-yeon’s? – receive the most unexpected answers. At times this film is nail-bitingly terrifying, but for the most part it is marked by a brooding, slightly unhinged mood of melancholy through which, as in Hideo Nakata’s ‘Dark Water’, madness scurries like a ghost.
Lose yourself in the haunted delirium of ‘A Tale of Two Sisters’ before Hollywood puts it on prozac