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. | Tale
of Two Sisters, A
(Janghwa, Hongryeon)
(2003) |
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This Korean chiller was screened in competition at the 2003 Sitges Film Festival and made a fairly positive impression even if it failed to take any of the awards. One of the factors working in its favour was that most of the other fare from the Orient screened at the festival was rather less than inspiring. A Tale of Two Sisters is a modern retelling of an old traditional Korean folk tale about an evil mother and her stepdaughters. It’s an old tale transformed into a modern setting. The film begins with a doctor interviewing a young patient asking her to tell him “what happened”. We see a young teenage sister return from a period in a mental institution along with her younger sister. The girls clearly despise their new stepmother, resenting her deeply for taking their real mothers place. They also harbour a similar resentment against their father who they blame for their mothers demise. Tensions rise as the manic stepmother starts to grate on the girls and a sort of open warfare breaks out. Slowly it emerges that all is not quite as it seems and that the house is home to the dead as well as the living. The film is beautifully crafted and very well acted and there are some terrifically well orchestrated shock scenes along the way, however the narrative becomes increasingly muddled as the film approaches its conclusion and the last half hour is pretty muddled and confusing. Once again the influence of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is evident and the film rekindles memories of recent ghostly hits “The Others” and “The Sixth Sense”. It’s a lovingly crafted, strongly acted film that sadly gets entangled in its own cleverness towards the end – A fine effort yet no cigar.
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