Janghwa, Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters)

You know what sucks? Moving. You know what sucks more then moving? Unpacking. Sure moving during a snowstorm was annoying and unpleasant. But this eternal shuffling of boxes and furniture from room to room is unbearable. It starts out innocuous enough, boxes go in the rooms in which they designated until everything is unloaded and in the apartment. Then the insanity happens.

You start unpacking in the kitchen because you are hungry, only to discover the cabinets are too small to hold any of your pans. Or maybe your oven is from the 1950′s and is larger then a Cadillac, yet for some reason seems to not have a pilot light anywhere for the oven, thus effectively tying your dinner preparation to only the stove top. But why just the stove top? Surely you have a microwave you can use? Well, it seems the architects who designed this building in 1920 didn’t have microwave’s in mind, and thus decided to wire four of the five rooms onto one circuit, leading to a fuse being blown every time one tries to nuke a burrito. I’ve been here seven days and already have gone through three fuses. It’s a race to see who comes out on top!

Of course, the fuse issue effects the rest of the apartment as well. In an effort to reduce the drain on the circuit my desk has now been shoved into the bedroom, which has the added bonus of allowing me to now watch thousands of hours of downloaded contraband from the comfort of my own bed, but it also means that I can no longer stay up late to write because my girlfriend is two feet away and yelping at me to “Come to bed!” In the past I was able to have a few blissfully productive minutes, but that is no more. Sure, she thinks that I always came to bed right on time, but she doesn’t know that I know that she knows that I sneak in a snooze alarms worth of creativity in the wee hours of the evening. All of that is gone now. Stupid fuses.

Now this isn’t to say there are no bonuses to moving and unpacking, though I can’t think of any at the moment. That’s probably because I am still getting used to the idiosyncrasies of my new apartment. I still don’t know which knob turns on which burner on the stove, where all the outlets are in the wall, or even when our mailman delivers my mail. Nor do I know why the girl living above us decides to blast her music at 8am on a Saturday, or how my cat Parker keeps opening the front door, or why some creepy ghost is living under my kitchen cabinets. Especially since I am not a South Korean girl struggling with my father’s marriage to a tempestuous shrew.

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with Asian horror films in that I love them while simultaneously hating how effective they are at creeping me out. Regardless of the country of origin they rarely seem to fail in effectively creating a mood that gives me the absolute willies. But while Asian horror films can weave terror into almost anything, often times the story telling is convoluted at best or incomprehensible at worst so while I was looking forward to watching A Tale of Two Sisters, I was prepared for my mind and my nerves to be chewed up and spit out.

A Tale of Two Sisters starts out simply enough, with a fairly dramatic opening at a mental hospital where a doctor examines a young girl named Soo-mi (Lim Su-jeung) and attempts to get her to describe what happened to her and her family on “that day”. The film then cuts to a family car arriving at a house in the country. Soo-mi and her younger sister Soo-yeon (Mun Geun-yeong) exit the car to play while their father Moo-hyeon (Kim Kap-su) goes into the house. Eventually the two girls finish playing and return to the house where they are confronted by their new step-mother Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah). What starts as a relatively friendly exchange quickly turns ugly once it is revealed that the girls mother has died. Eun-joo eventually snaps at the girls who in turn storm off to their rooms. While the tension from two young girls resenting the replacement for their dead mother would be enough for most films, writer/director Kim Ji-woon (The Foul King) has plenty more in store for me.

Visually A Tale of Two Sisters is most impressive, as every set aches with remorse and dread throughout the film. Every nook and crevice seems to threaten you as a viewer and it adds considerable depth to the dread being evoked by the characters in the film. Something wicked is lurking, and it isn’t simply the stepmother or the occasional ghost that menacingly appears, the house itself seems to drip suffering from every seam. Kim Ji-woon certainly shows a knack for mood and he clearly relishes in dragging his viewers along for the ride.

Kim Ji-woon also does a solid job of pacing the film, adding tiny details and plot point in each scene, carefully allowing the mystery to unfold in front of the viewer at a deliberate, yet effective, speed. There are even a few odd scenes thrown in which appear to act as nothing more then giant red herrings, which is always an added bonus. While these scenes may detract from the primary narrative, and possibly befuddle the audience for a time, they offer up some of the biggest scares in the film and some incredibly memorable moments. In a lesser film these scenes would detract from the film, or even derail the story, but Kim Ji-woon successfully incorporates these stylistic flourishes into the story to little, if any, detriment.

But while the style and the pacing of the film is excellent, as with other Asian horror films the story is the clear weak point of the film. But oddly enough it isn’t because the storyline is so convoluted as to be indecipherable, but rather for me the twists were far too easy to recognize. The editing of the film is what allows for there to be any mystery that needs solved at all, yet even with such added “tricks” the story is relatively simple and straight forward. So simple that when the twist was revealed that I was convinced that there must be more to what was going on, as the film couldn’t possibly make sense. And then A Tale of Two Sisters added an additional twist that was both necessary and quite desirable. Rather then feeling cheated, the story was given additional depth and allowed the film a resolution that was fitting in both its ghastly nature and its tidy storytelling.