TALE OF TWO SISTERS

If you were thrilled by Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, you will love the nerve-wrenching twists and turns of Korean director, Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters; a psychological horror whose scares more than rival its Japanese counterparts. It is South Korea’s third grossing movie of 2003 and Dreamworks have acquired the rights to remake it in the United States.

SYNOPSIS

We see the young woman for the first time in a spare, pale hospital office. She’s so depressed she can’t even tell her doctor her name, so withdrawn that she’s brushed her hair to cover her face. But when he asks her if she can remember “that day,” her mind travels back in time…

Su-mi and her younger sister Su-yeon are returning home to their father’s large, but dark and somewhat foreboding house after a stay in the hospital. Their dad is taciturn and burdened, in contrast to their step-mother, Eun-joo, who greets them with forced enthusiasm and more than a little sense of irritation. She sends them off to their rooms to unpack, and right away a series of bizarre, and increasingly frightening events begin to pile up. To begin with, when Su-mi opens up her desk to put away a notebook, she discovers it’s already full of notebooks, paper and pens. And when she opens the closet to hang up her clothes, it too is full, with a dozen dresses, six of each in a single design. More ominous, when Su-yeon beds down for the night, she’s awakened by the sound of her bedroom door being opened by a terrifying hand. She cowers under her blanket, but when it’s ripped back, she finds herself surprisingly alone.

With their father retreating from the family affairs, the two girls find themselves in growing conflict with their step-mother. At her worst, she locks Su-yeon in a closet, promising the cowering girl that she’ll stay locked up until she apologizes for her lack of filial affection. Su-mi comes to her sister’s rescue and, indeed, whenever Eu-jeon forces a confrontation, Su-mi stands right up to her.

But events pass from the eerie to the creepy. Is that a ghostly young woman hiding on the floor beneath a kitchen cabinet? What is the terrifying creature that invades Su-mi’s bedroom?

All draws to a fateful climax when her exasperated father claims to a disbelieving Su-mi that Su-yeon has been dead for months. Meanwhile, downstairs, Eun-joo uses a poker to viciously beat a large cloth bag; a bag with something in it, something that bleeds…

Official Website: http://films.tartanfilmsusa.com/ataleoftwosisters

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Trailer at iFilm

CAST
Yeom Jeong-a EUN-JOO, the stepmother
Im Soo-jung SU-MI
Moon Geun-young SU-YEON
Kim Kab-su MU-HYUN

CREW
Kim Jee-woon DIRECTOR/SCREENPLAY
Oh Kimin PRODUCERS
Oh Jung-wan
Kim Young CO-PRODUCER
Lee Mogae CINEMATOGRAPHY
Oh Seung-chul LIGHTING
Lee Hyun-mi EDITING
Kim Jin-hee
Cho Geun-hyun PRODUCTION DESIGNER
Ok Soo-kyung COSTUMES
Lee Byeong-woo MUSIC

DIRECTOR KIM JEE-WOON

Kim Jee-woon was born in Seoul in 1964. He began his career as a stage actor, then a stage director, where he directed the plays Hot Sea (1994) and Movie Movie (1995). Moving onto screen writing, his screenplay Wonderful Seasons won the Best Screenplay award at the Premiere Scenario contest in South Korea in 1997.

In the same year, Kim’s second screenplay The Quiet Family, a black comedy, won him the Best Screenplay prize at the first Cine21 Public Subscription Contest. He went on to make his directorial debut with this screenplay, which won the Best Film Award at the Portugal Fantasporto Film Festival, and was officially selected at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Kim’s next film The Foul King, became the box office sensation in Korea in 2000. The number one movie in Korea for six months, it was watched by over two million people. An official entry at the international film festivals of Toronto, Berlin and Hong Kong, The Foul King received domestic and international accolade and sealed Kim’s reputation as one of Korea’s leading directors.

Kim completed a short film, Coming Out, part of an omnibus by three different Korean directors, intended for screening over the internet. His latest project, Memories, was the Korean segment of the omnibus movie, Three, co-directed by Nonzi Nizimbutr and Peter Chan.

FILMOGRAPHY
2003 – A Tale of Two Sisters (director, screenwriter)

2002 – Three: Memories (co-director, screenwriter)

2000 – Coming Out (co-director)

2000 – The Foul King (director, screenwriter)

1998 – The Quiet Family (director, screenwriter)

1995 – Movie Movie (Stage play, director)

1994 – Hot Sea (Stage play, director)

Review of A Tale of Two Sisters

The style of this film is on the same scale as The Ring, The Grudge and The Eye and it appears that Asian filmmakers are giving us something American filmmakers can't [or at least need to remake for wide release in the US] and that is a creepy factor that is off the scale.

While this film may not keep you up at night [as The Ring did that first we viewed it] there is something here that sticks with you long after you have returned to your normal life.

The first few minutes minutes of the film seem to be leading you somewhere yet it is hard to keep your focus with the slow pace and artful transitions between scenes. The painfully slow beginning is worth the sitting through to get to the rest of this film. Especially, if you have not read the synopsis [above]. There is a point in the film where you feel the shock of the plot twist nearly as much as the character it is happening to.

The effects are hauntingly similar to other Asian horror films to hit these shores but the are sure to please the avid horror fans among us. While many horror films have relied on chilling music to help produce those feeling of dread and fright, this film relies heavily on other auditory devices to thrill and fill your imagination and get your adrenaline pumping. Heck you could just listen to this film and get scared.

However, the film never truly fills in all the gaps that some of the imagery produces and leaves us wondering if we have gone equally as mad as the main character Su-Mi.

We give this 3.5 out of 5 stars. [In other words it is worth seeing.]