A Tale of Two Sisters Review
This week’s Friday night movie pick was the 2003 classic, A Tale of Two Sisters.
I actually first watched the movie last year because I had found out about its huge impact on Korean horror. The movie is Korea’s highest-grossing horror film and the first to be screened in America. It is consistently in top lists for one of the best films in Asian horror, and resonated a lot with audiences. It has a 2009 remake, The Uninvited, directed by the Guard Brothers.
Written and directed by Kim Jee Woon (A Quiet Family, I Saw the Devil, The Age of Shadows), the film follows Su Mi (Im Soo Jung), a teenager who has just been released from a mental hospital and sent back home with her sister, dad, and her new stepmother. Tensions rise between the girls and their stepmother, and with the constant nightmares of her dead mother, Su Mi is tormented.
Because of the nature of the movie, there really is no way to do any sort of a review/analysis without spoiling some things, so while I might not go over every plot of the story in this review, there will still be major spoilers. I highly suggest watching the movie before reading this or anything about the movie. Some of the plot is a surprise and really adds to the enjoyment of the movie as a whole. This is your warning.
A Tale of Two Sisters is loosely based on a popular Joseon-era Korean fairy tale The Story of Janghwa and Hongryeon. Following the death of their mother, a father of two girls remarries a woman who does not like the girls and repeatedly abuses them. When the eldest is about to marry, the stepmother sabotages the marriage which exiles the daughter from the family. The mother tells one of her sons to push the daughter into a pond, where she drowns. While she is drowning a tiger comes and attacks the son. The mother gets what she wants with the daughter gone, but at the cost of her son, and becomes violent to the existing stepdaughter and eventually her fate is the same as the other stepdaughter. It isn’t until the girl’s ghosts are able to convince the new mayor of what the stepmother is doing that she is found guilty and sentenced to death. The story ends with the daughter’s spirits being able to rest, and the father remarrying with a new wife, bearing twins.
Still from the 1939 movie based on the fairy tale.
A Tale of Two Sisters has everything I love for a horror movie. I love dark, creepy, atmospheric stories that stay with me. There’s a mystery that is slowly being unfolded and you don’t know what’s going to happen. The tension is from the unknown rather than jump scares or gore.
When I’ve come across people talking about the movie, the biggest plot twist in the movie to them is the reveal that the sister, Su Yeon (Moon Geun Young), is dead. While it does add a great layer of surprise to the movie, I think it is intentionally set up to hold more weight to throw you off from what I believe is the greater twist: when you find out the horrific cause of death of the mother and her sister. When you realize why Su Mi is the way she is it makes the whole story so much more horrific because it’s real. The scare is not her dead mother appearing before her, or a ghost hand grabbing hers. It’s real-life horror that has emotionally ruined her life. Su Mi manifested her sister because she was the only comfort she had, the poor girl didn’t have a chance. Her sister is there the minute she returns to the house after coming back from the hospital. Su Yeon represents the only time that Su Mi was happy and becomes the only way to feel safe. Yet she is also her constant reminder of failure.
When Su Mi is confronted by the realization that her sister is dead, that’s when her mania goes into a tailspin and Su Yeon disappears from her side. The way Su Mi ‘sees’ her stepmother during the scenes of her dragging the bag is the manifestation of her rage and torment and it does such a good job of giving the viewer a greater understanding of what is going on in her head. The movie pulls you around constantly. From believing that the stepmother is really doing everything, to finding out that Su Mi is an unreliable narrator because everything you’ve just seen was her doing, to the realization that the true story is so much worse. It is literally placing you in the torment that Su Mi is actually in. It’s super effective and is probably one of my favorite things about the movie. I was horrified because I was seeing what she was, and it was unsettling.
Another thing that stuck with me from the first time I watched this and again after my rewatch, was the father’s role in everything. In the fairy tale that I talked about above, the father does not have much of a role in the story. He isn’t part of the abuse (the daughters choose not to tell him) but does believe the stepmother over the daughter. In the end, the girl’s spirits come to him to wish him a good life. In the movie, the father does a lot more even when he is shown doing the very least. It’s unsettling to see him interact with Su Mi because he knows that she’s still seeing her dead sister. He refuses to take away the piece of furniture in the house that is the literal cause of everything that happened. He doesn’t acknowledge that he has a greater role in the death of his first wife and his daughter or the mental trauma his eldest has to endure because of it. He has clearly admitted defeat in helping her. It’s a repeat of what he did with his first wife. He left her when she was mentally and physically unwell and moved on. He literally hid her in a closet to die.
A Tale of Two Sisters is a movie that I would recommend to everyone and is a personal favorite. While there are parts of the story that are classically horror, the real horror is in the events that happened in the house. I think it does a good job in combining real horrors with fake, and keeps you guessing the entire way through with great surprises and turns. The story unfolds in such a great way that it left me thinking for a while.
Let me know if you’ve watched the movie as well and your thoughts on it. This second viewing has really solidified my love for it, and I was able to focus on a lot more things that were going on without having to focus on the subtitles.
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