Review #102: 'A Tale of Two Sisters' (2003)

Bloody Hollywood. Stealing everybody's ideas and Americanising everything (I suppose I should have spelt that 'Americanizing'!). Stealing UK ideas (Get Carter (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), Deal Or No Deal), Asian films (The Ring (1998), Infernal Affairs (2002), The Grudge (2002)) and the best of world cinema (Let The Right One In (2008), The Vanishing (1988), Wings Of Desire (1987)) for their own profit! Just kidding. It's easy to say all that without realising that the U.S. are most bum-raped of them all when it comes to other countries stealing their ideas. They've been criticised most recently for their seemingly endless remakes of Asian horrors and turning a quick buck. But the remakes are usually so damn awful that people are quick to forget that the originals are pretty shocking too.

Su-Mi (Su-Jeong Lim) and Su-Yeon (Geun-Young Moon) are young sisters who arrive at a remote house with their father. They are going to live with their stepmother who they both dislike. The sisters are very close, and Su-Yeon especially clings to her sister like a safety blanket. Things soon start to get strange - bruises start appearing on Su-Yeon's arms, a unknown entity sneaks into their room at night, and a strange figure appears at the base of Su-Mi's bed and drips blood from between its legs. Su-Mi believes that the stepmother is up to no good and is trying to mentally torture the two, but then it becomes clear that all may not be what it seems.

What begins as a slow and quietly menacing film quickly loses its grip. The long, beautifully framed shots led me to believe that this would be a slow-burner, and would creep up on me to take a drastic turn like many a good Asian film does. But it soon became apparent that the fact that not much was happening was not a clever build-up, but a way to deceive me while covering up just how frightfully dull it is. I felt like every scene I was watching after the first fifteen minutes or so I'd seen countless times before.

I don't quite understand why Asian horror films all seem to feel the need to include the long, black-haired spectre with one eye poking out underneath. It was first done (as far as I know) in the thoroughly enjoyable and effective Ring, which seem to kick-start the whole Asian horror boom. Then it turned up in The Grudge, which was pretty damn terrible. And now here, a film that likes to think it belongs in the more sophisticated category. The scene where it appears just seemed like such a desperate cloy for a cheap scare that sat uneasily with the rest of the film, and just lacked any sort of imagination because it is literally the exact same 'character' seen before.

An absolute crushing disappointment, as I'd heard so many good things about this film. But I found it unoriginal, uninteresting and lacking any kind of genuine shocks, scares or psychological torment. The film is beautifully filmed however, and the two girls in the lead roles are very good, showing a timidness and mental unbalance way beyond their years. The film was, of course, was remade into The Uninvited (2009), which I've heard is truly, and inevitably, terrible.


Directed by: Jee-Woon Kim
Starring: Su-Jeong Lim, Geun-Young Moon, Jung-Ah Yum, Kap-Su Kim
Country: South Korea

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie