A Tale of Two Sisters

Programme Notes

A Tale Of Two Sisters is arguably the most creepy tale to emerge from east Asia since Hideo Nakata's much-imitated 1998 masterpiece Ringu. The spine-chilling moments occur regularly in the first half of the film before giving way to somewhat histrionic moments and baffling, protracting twists. But even they don't undermine its power.

Loosely based on a Korean folk-story, the film mostly plays out as an extended flashback after a prologue that features a doctor asking a seemingly mute girl "Can you tell me about that day?"

Su-Mi (Lim) and her younger sister Su-Yeon (Mun) arrive home with their father Mu-Hyun (Kim) after they've spent some time in hospital for an unspecified malady. However, it soon becomes clear that mental illness is at the heart of their problems. Not only do the girls have an uneasy - and in the case of Su-Mi, openly acrimonious - relationship with their stepmother Eun-Joo (Yum), but all three females seem to be suffering from varying neurotic disturbances. Aren't they always in ghost stories? Anyway, Mu-Hyun seems largely insensitive to the tension around him, merely doling out pills occasionally.

Holed up in their large house, the family's dysfunction is manifested through strange experiences and events. Someone or something comes into Su-Yeon's room, Su-Mi has horrific dreams within dreams, footsteps can be heard upstairs, and a guest who comes for dinner suffers from more than a little indigestion.

Bit by bit, Ji-Woon Kim's accomplished film fills in the cryptic details, but not hastily and not emphatically. What became of the girl's mother? What trauma did the girls suffer? Who are the ghosts? And what is the significance of the wardrobe that scares Su-Yeon so much? The enigma of what has happened within this family is teased and twisted.

When physical violence is perpetrated by Eun-Joo against Su-Yeon, the change in tone from repressed and chilling to screechy and dynamic threatens the tension of the film. But Kim takes the story even further.

As well as Ringu, The Sixth Sense and The Others provide obvious frames of reference for Western audiences, but A Tale Of Two Sisters also fits neatly with Asian fare like Nakata's Dark Water and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Seance in its dedication to mystery and gloom. As with such films, there are some seriously unnerving moments and an ultimate ambiguity which may partly arise from the phenomenon of something being, if not lost in translation, at least befuddled by translation.

Westerners, even those familiar with the genre's thematic tropes of neuroses and vengeance, may still not get the subtle implications of a girl whose features are obscured by her hair, for example. This is such a recurrent motif in these films that it must have a cultural significance in Japan and Korean that we in the West just can't get a handle on. The effectiveness of the film isn't compromised, but you may leave scratching your head. (Just what the heck is in that sack for starters?)

Daniel Etherington
filmfour.com

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