re:mote voices

Title: A Tale Of Two Sisters [Janghwa, Hongryeon]
Cast: Kap-su Kim, Jung-ah Yum, Su-jeong Lim, Geun-yeong Mun
Director: Ji-woon Kim

Like Ju-on, which also showed as part of this year’s Asia Extreme season, A Tale Of Two Sisters seem to revolve around the events of the past in a now haunted house. This Korean horror starts with a family’s return to their own home, with suggestions of sickness and tragedy being dropped into the narrative from the start.

The house is big, wooden, and remote – populated by the two sisters, their ineffectual father, and the step mother with whom they clash at every turn. For the most part reality is straight forward, despite the familial tensions. But at night, things change, the younger sister sure that someone came into her room, the older waking up from horrific dreams. How much of this is triggered by the past’s associations and how much from the taint the past has left on the spirit of the house?

In some ways the scenes from A Tale Of Two Sisters could be thought of as approaching generic. The rise of so many Asian horror films meaning that the twisted figure of an Asian woman with long dark hair has become a default spectre. As evidenced by The Ring, Audition, Ju-on, and indeed A Tale Of Two Sisters. Indeed the bag of something bloody and horrible also has echoes of Audition, while the nightmarish scenes of crawling corpses, and ectoplasmic goop have parallels in both The Ring and Ju-On. Even so there is a certain appeal to A Tale Of Two Sisters, the success coming with all of these films from their ability to create at times suspense and tension.

In the case of Two Sisters, the narrative actually flips out towards the end, so that it at times becomes difficult to be entirely certain what is actually going on. Creating the kind of atmosphere where you come to suspect that only a second viewing will shed light on certain things. Even then, there were points where I very much knew exactly what was going to happen next.