Original title: Janghwa, Hongryeon

!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY CRUCIAL PLOT TWISTS!!

Kim Jee-woon’s stylishly directed, smartly written and beautifully photographed horror/family drama is lossley based on a traditional Korean fairy tale Janghwa Hongryeon jeon that had already been adapted at least four times previously – in 1924 by Park Jun-hyun, 1936 by Hong Gae-myeong, 1956 by Jeong Chang-hwa and as Dae Jang-hwa Hong-ryeon jeon in 1962 by Jeong Chang-hwa. This version remains the best known in the west where it played to great critical acclaim and strong enough box office to warrant an English language Hollywood remake, The Uninvited (2009).

Teenager Bae Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) is released from psychiatric hospital where she been treated for shock and psychosis. She returns home to the secluded country home she shares with her beloved younger sister Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young), her father Moo-hyeon (Kim Kap-soo) and her cold and distant stepmother, Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah). The parents’ marriage is on the rocks thanks to a sexless marriage and Eun-joo requires constant medication. Against this backdrop, Su-mi’s recovery seems shaky at best – she’s haunted by terrifying nightmares of her mother who hanged herself and comes to realise that Eun-joo was actually an at-home nurse caring for her terminally ill mother and comes to suspects that she’s abusing Eun-joo. When their uncle Sun-kyu (Woo Ki-hong) and aunt Mi-hee (Lee Seung-bi) arrive for a dinner party, things take a very odd turn – Eun-joo tries to entertain them with a bizarre stories that leaves everyone uncomfortable before Mi-hee has a seizure, claiming to be able to see a ghost girl in a cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. Things spiral out of control until Moo-hyeon reveals the shocking truth – the only people living in the house are he and Su-mi. Su-yeon had been killed in an accident and Su-mi suffers from dissociative identity disorder, creating  a version of Eun-joo as her alternate personality. But when she’s sent back to the hospital, the real Eun-joo returns from a trip away and learns that the ghosts of Su-yeon and the girl’s mother are very real – and very angry.

Apart from a cheat involving the placement of medication on the wrong side of the dinner table (it should have been offered to Su-mi and not the imaginary Eun-joo) that could equally be a continuity error or a deliberate attempt to throw us off the scent, Kim’s script holds together remarkably well and should keep most viewers guessing right up to the two big reveals – that some of the characters aren’t real but that the ghosts are. It all owes a debt to The Sixth Sense (1999) (and possibly, with its imaginary alter egos, David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999)) and like M. Night Shyamalan, Kim scatters clues here and there which suddenly become very obvious on repeat viewings, clues often revealed in banal dialogue or clever direction – until the moment of the reveal, you never seen Moo-hyeon and Su-yeon in the same frame together.

It’s all very clever stuff but Kim doesn’t skimp on the scares. The appearance of the girl’s mother in a bedroom, her neck broken, is hair-raising stuff as is the brief shock of the little girl – who we later realise is the ghost of Su-yeon – under the kitchen sink is no less unnerving. There’s a very good 360 degree camera move that reveals Su-mi’s double personality and the dinner party scene is a very effective highlight, going from awkward embarrassment to complete terror in a matter of seconds. It also perfectly encapsulates the cleverness of Kim’s script – that’s Su-mi at the table with her father, not Eun-joo and the ghost in the cupboard is, of course, Su-yeon, one of the nuances that only becomes clear on a second viewing.

How much any of what we see in the film is real and how much of it is merely taking place in Su-mi’s very damaged psyche is up for debate. Having mixed reality and fantasy throughout the film, the last few minutes mixes past and present, jumbling up time to take us back to the site of the original trauma that began all the drama while also revealing that very little of what we’ve seen so far can be trusted. It’s a tactic that will infuriate some, but they appear to have been in the minority. When the film opened in the States, it became the highest-grossing Korean film ever to open there and it largely wowed the critics who praised its excellent performances (Im, Moon and Yum in particular are excellent) and Kim’s elegant direction. It took home awards from Sitges, Busan, Fantasporto and Brussels among other festivals and was so popular that the remake seemed inevitable almost as soon as it opened in the States. The Guard Brothers directed the reworking, with Emily Browning and Arielle Kebbel taking over as the sisters. It was a moderate hit but nowhere near as well liked as the original. The film also seems t have influenced the Austrian film Ich seh, Ich she/Goodnight Mommy (2014) and by extension, it’s American remake released by Netflix in 2022.

However, it’s the original that’s the essential choice. It remains one of the very best of the wave of Korean horror films that we’ve seen in the west in the 21st century and given the generally very high standard, that’s high praise indeed. Having already made comedy horror Joyonghan Gajok/The Quiet Family (1998) (remade in Japan as Katakuri-ke no Kofuku/The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) by Takashi Miike) and the wrestling comedy Banchikwang/The Foul King (2000), A Tale of Two Sisters really launched Kim’s career int the stratosphere and he went on to make many more fine films, including gangster film Dalkomhan insaeng/A Bittersweet Life (2005), wild and crazy western spoof Jo-eun nom nappeun nom isanghan nom/The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008), serial killer thriller I Saw the Devil (2010) and live-action anime remake Illang: The Wolf Brigade (2018). They were good, sometimes very good, but none of them quite packed the emotional punch of A Tale of Two Sisters.