Amazingly, around these parts, we’ve gone all come-hither for the UGC Asian film season. It seems especially appropriate, now that this fantastically phantasmagoric Alice In Wonderland riff has arrived hot on the psychedelically-hob-nailed-boots of last fortnight’s delightfully demented Gozu.
Having long languished under the shadow of neighbouring Japan in the genre movie stakes (let’s just say that if you ever find yourself in a room with Korean sci-fi epic 2009 Lost Memories, take note of the exits early), Korea cinema has matured sufficiently to produce effective teen horror fodder, such as Whispering Corridors and the forthcoming Phone. But of late, Korean horror isn’t merely displaying an aptitude for mimicry – it’s also fostering a unique cluster of unsettling preoccupations.
While Japanese horror frequently places the freakiest of girls-on-top with hypodermic needles immediately to hand, the Korean new-new-wave upstarts are delving into sadistic post-colonial dick-waving fantasies (well, if one can consider razor blades applied to incredibly sensitive and dark places to be dick-waving), or dogging psycho-sexually suffering heroines.
Not that we should complain. A Tale Of Two Sisters is one brilliantly eerie mind-fuck, belonging to the latter category. Like Memento Mori, there’s a strong Heavenly Creatures undercurrent – familial discord, schoolgirls with a near-sapphic bond and startling Electra complexes – but Ji Woon Kim adds a chilling supernaturalism to the proceedings.
His two touchingly close titular sisters return from a psychiatric hospital to live with their cold, aloof father and a hateful sadistic stepmother, who endlessly accuses the girls of inviting some sinister presence into their already creepy home. To add to the abuse, the sisters begin to experience nightmarish visions of their late mother, menstruating madwomen having bad hair days and gruesome murder. Su-Mi (Su-Jeong Lim), the elder girl, is fiercely maternal toward her helpless younger sibling, but will her vigilance and blazing love be enough to protect her?
Well, just as you’re contemplating that, A Tale Of Two Sisters hits you with a quantum narrative twist, and pulls you right through the looking glass. This sixth screen adaptation of the South Korean folktale Rose Flower, Red Lotus is smart, novel and radically fragmented with a disquieting, unhinged temporal structure. Indeed, aside from the opening scene wherein a psychiatrist refers to institutionalised Su-Mi as Hong Reon (the Korean for Red Lotus – the Buddhist symbol for passivity that transcends the human condition – Ha! Korean irony…) even a native would hardly recognise the source material.
This moving, compellingly melodramatic and scary-as-hell movie is held together by an uncannily impressive performance from the gorgeous Lim, and superbly oppressive atmospherics. As with Repulsion or The Shining, the house itself functions as a character decked out in glorious décor gothique – imagine if Ruby Gloom went to the Laura Ashley Victoriana department – and made even spookier by sublime levitating camerawork that suggests a weasel lurks under every cocktail cabinet. Heavens, even the wallpaper is the most sinister ornamentation since they stopped making that beige and green fabric stuff in the seventies.
It all adds up to the most manipulative and terrifying thing to emerge from Korea since the Great Leader. A minor classic. See it before Hollywood fucks up the remake.