Netflix Fix -- A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003)

This weekend, there's a new cute-teen-girl-haunted-by-ghosts-with-long-black-hair flick coming: The Uninvited. While watching the trailer, it only takes a cool 35 seconds, give or take a millisecond, to realize that its nothing more than a brain-drained, PG-13, Hollywood-lessened remake of a solid Asian horror exercise. The list of terrible examples is frightening (for all the wrong reasons): The Eye; Pulse; One Missed Call; Shutter. Remember any one of those? I'd hope not. The only worthy exceptions have been The Grudge (the passable first one, and just-barely the slightly-less-than-passable sequel) and the first of this kind, The Ring, which genuinely won.

And don't even get me started on Alexandre Aja's dreadfully-moronic Mirrors.

The ingredients found in The Uninvited's trailer would all shout "Present!" if the theater its playing in were a high school's homeroom: the above-mentioned ghosts with long dark locks, haunting an attractive, tormented young girl or two, most likely within the walls of a spook-house that was innocently seen as domestically-snug. The ghosts contort and crawl around awkwardly, as if the limbs are twisting and broken. And by trailer's end, a seasoned moviegoer is most likely groaning, "How many times have I seen that shit before?!"

See, and groan, for yourselves (in case you've yet to):


It wouldn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that I won't be seeing The Uninvited this weekend, or any time after (until the DVD hits, potentially). No use in wasting cash on something you know is going to be derivative, and, besides, I think it'd be excruciating having to watch the gorgeous, comedically-gifted Elizabeth Banks unsuccessfully try to act "scary" or "sinister"; it smells of Ryan Reynolds' unconvincing work in that crappy Amityville Horror remake, something foul.

I'd be better off just watching the Korean flick this generic ho-hummer is based on, I thought late last week, which is why I bumped A Tale of Two Sisters to the tippy of my Queue's pecking order the other day. The critical love for Two Sisters, made in 2003 by filmmaker Ji-woon Kim, is across-the-map glowing, some film-heads claiming that it's one of the creepiest movies to have come out within the last decade. That's a bold enough statement for me to be compelled. Sold!




C'mon....All you need is that preview to accept that The Uninvited is merely America's bloodless, overacted, miscast, neutered version.

Having just watched A Tale of Two Sisters, I don't need to actually "see" The Uninvited to know that its source material has been truncated and streamlined; A Tale of Two Sisters is heavier than an anvil hat on the brain. The Hollywood suits would never test the intelligence of the film's teenaged target audience the ways that Ji-woon Kim does here. The last 25 minutes alone had my head spinning and think-box grinding away, trying to decipher the twists and flip-flops that kept coming at me faster than Lost being fast-forwarded. The final shot, before the credits do their thing, brings the explanation home, though I'm still a bit cloudy on a few points that I won't go into here---I'd be better served discussing this flick with somebody else who has seen it, rather than circle-jerking myself off with a one-man analysis.



The skeletal story seems elementary: teenage Su-mi returns home after a stint in a mental insitution, and right off the bat we can tell that's all not well on the homefront. Daddy is shacking up with a stepmother, a replacement for Su-mi's birth-mom who seems to have died years before. Su-mi, defiant and confrontational towards her stepmum, only has one ally, her meekish and quiet sister Su-Yeoun. Before the Su's even know it, supernatural happenings start plaguing the house, sketchy goings-on that cause the stepmom to gradually increase her bitchiness yet leave the father strangely apathetic, ignoring the problems under his roof.

Like all the best Asian horror flicks, A Tale of Two Sisters never rushes itself to get to jump-scenes or gotcha!-moments. Ji-woon Kim lets the very-layered story unravel with real patience and very little music. Really, only about three or four official "scare scenes" are to be found, but that's inconsequential thanks to an overall mood of gloom, remorse, sorrow, and devolving pleasantness. There's also this strong sense of claustrophobia being that the entire movie (save for a few twenty-second instances here and there) takes place in the house. Each room becomes unusually familiar, and seemingly-unimportant objects we can see on dressers and under tables later reveal themselves to be crucial elements.



As for the horror pieces here, one part in particular stands out like a third nipple: it's a dinner scene, the stepmother and father having invited the girls' uncle and his main squeeze over for some supper. Ji-woon Kim plays this one perfectly, lulling the viewer into a state of numbness with an extra-long, one-sided, bizarrely-staged conversation that goes on and on, before suddenly the meal erupts into total mayhem:


A Tale of Two Sisters is definitely one that I'll have to watch again at some point; one sitdown doesn't feel like I'm doing the film justice. The twist(s) that the flick drops toward the end demand deeper looks. And the film's powerful melancholy vice-grip has me thinking that it'll be one I ponder for some days to come.



I may actually need to see The Uninvited sooner than later, come to think. Just to witness firsthand how badly they've sliced and diced Ji-woon Kim's R-rated, cerebral work. Sucks that Paramount Pictures isn't having any early media screenings....though that in itself is a red flag for the film's probably-fecal quality. Oh well.