Director: Kim Ji-woon
Screenplay: Kim Ji-woon
Starring: Im Soo-jung, Moon Geun-young, Yeom Jeong-ah, Kim Kap-su
One-sentence summary: Two sisters, Su-mi and Su-yeon, return from the hospital only to have to deal not only with their new (and rather suspicious) stepmother but with a strange presence in their house.
Review: Some fairy tales are pretty horrific if you think about them. This isn't limited to just the ones from the Brothers Grimm--it's something that's found in other cultures as well. A Tale of Two Sisters is a loose adaptation of a Korean folktale, Rose Flower and Red Lotus, that does, yes, feature an evil stepmother. And people dying. And ghosts.
A Tale of Two Sisters takes the basic idea of the folktale (two sisters against an evil stepmother) and runs with it in a way that eventually the movie doesn't resemble the original folktale at all. This isn't a bad thing because there's a beautiful twist at the end, but I can't say I'm too happy with how the movie got there.
There are a lot of hints scattered throughout the movie that make sense only after you've seen the whole film, so it's a movie best experienced at least twice, but on the second viewing I'm not sure it holds up as well. The movie felt disjointed, particularly near the end when it felt like it kept going and going. If Kim Ji-woon had just moved some scenes around, maybe it wouldn't have felt so patchwork. I also think he could've held off on a couple of clues that would've made the reveal that much more shocking.
I think above all, this isn't a horror movie. It's marketed as one because it's easy to pull some choice ghost scenes from the movie and put them in the trailer, but that's not what the movie is really about. At the end of the day, the real stars are the family members, and the odd little haunting bits don't really seem to affect their day-to-day life all that much. The presence of ghosts (okay, and a couple of "scary" scenes) doesn't mean it should automatically be classified as a horror movie. There's a certain kind of atmosphere in horror, and I can't say that A Tale of Two Sisters really has that atmosphere, but it's okay because the movie, for all its faults, is a decent watch--horror or not.
Just think of it as a modern-day fairy tale, complete with an evil stepmother, and you've got yourself in the right mindset.
Final word: A Tale of Two Sisters is a decent film but questionable writing/directing decisions means that the movie is not as great as it could have been.
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