A Tale of Two Sisters

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A Tale of Two Sisters

Poster for A Tale of Two Sisters
Directed by Kim Ji-Woon
Written by Kim Ji-Woon
Starring Im Su-jeong
Moon Geun-young
Yeom Jeong-ah
Kim Kap-su
Music by Lee Byeong-wu
Cinematography Lee Mo-Gae
Editing by Go Im-pyo
Distributed by Cineclick Asia
Big Blue Film
Release date(s) Flag of South Korea June 13, 2003
Running time 115 min.
Language Korean
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile
Korean name
Hangul: 장화,홍련
Hanja: 薔花,紅蓮
Revised Romanization: Janghwa, Hongryeon
McCune-Reischauer: Changhwa, Hongnyŏn

A Tale of Two Sisters (장화, 홍련 Janghwa, Hongryeon literally 'Rose Flower, Red Lotus') is a 2003 South Korean psychological horror film. It was directed by Kim Ji-Woon and is both the highest-grossing Korean horror film and the first to be screened in American theatres.

The film is inspired by a Joseon Dynasty folktale entitled "Janghwa Hongreyon-jon", which has been adapted to film several times. An American remake was scheduled to begin production in 2004 but has been delayed.

Taglines:

  • Our sorrow was conceived long before our birth.
  • Every family has its dark secrets.

Contents

[edit] Cast

Actor Role
Im Su-jeong Su-mi
Moon Geun Young Su-yeon
Yeom Jeong-ah Eun-joo (Stepmother)
Kim Kap-su Moo-hyeon (Father)

[edit] Synopsis

Two girls discover a malignant force in their home while their stepmother's behavior becomes increasingly erratic.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film opens in a psychiatric hospital, where a doctor is interviewing a young girl whose dark hair hangs over her face. He shows her photos of her family in an attempt to coax her into talking about "that day".

In an apparent flashback, we see a family arrive at their house in the country. Two girls, Su-mi and the younger Su-yeon, step out of the car and go off to play while their father walks into the house. Later, when they go inside, they are met by their new stepmother, Eun-joo. We learn that the girls' mother has died. Eun-joo tries to be conciliatory to them at first, but their clear resentment of and indifference to her drives her to become shrill and hectoring and she storms off.

Going up-stairs into their rooms, the girls find them already filled with exact replicas of the clothing and things they have brought with them. The dinner conversation that night is brief and strained; the girls don't speak, and the father leaves early, handing Eun-joo two pills to take. She swallows them and scolds the children, who leave.

That night Su-yeon is frightened by creaking floor-boards and her door opening by itself; she flees into her older sister's bed, telling her that someone went into her room. Su-mi gets up to investigate, finding her father asleep on the couch instead of with Eun-joo. She fixes his blanket and goes into the kitchen for some water, where she is interrupted by her stepmother. The two argue and Su-mi goes back to bed, where she tells Su-yeon that it was their stepmother who frightened her.

Su-mi has a nightmare about a girl with long, stringy hair and bloody legs who steps into her bed. When she awakes she finds blood on the sheets and realizes that Su-yeon must be having her first menstruation. She goes to the master bedroom for towels and menstrual pads; on the way back Eun-joo stops her. She laughs upon learning of Su-yeon's first menstrual period, saying how funny it is because her own just started as well.

Later, Su-mi argues with her father, telling him to get rid of the wardrobe in her sister's room, but he refuses, insisting that she had promised not to bring it up.

That afternoon, Su-mi goes to an old conservatory, where she finds a trunk full of her late mother's things. She takes them back to her room and looks through the photographs. She finds that Eun-joo appears in them all, even family portraits from years past, as if she had been in their lives all along. She hides this discovery when Su-yeon walks in. Su-mi notices marks on her sister's arm, and Su-yeon admits they were caused by their stepmother.

Su-mi marches down-stairs and confronts her stepmother, who calmly admits hurting Su-yeon to punish her. They fight loudly and her father comes downstairs, where he finds Su-mi alone and in tears, though she refuses to tell him what the commotion was about.

That night the girls' stepmother's brother (step-uncle) and his wife come to visit. At dinner and with the girls up-stairs, Eun-joo launches into a bizarre story that supposedly occurred in her brother-in-law's youth; he quietly but angrily denies that it happened. Suddenly the uncle's wife has a seizure and sees a girl under the kitchen sink.

Matters in the house go from bad to worse, as Eun-joo takes to locking Su-yeon in her wardrobe and becomes increasingly nasty while the girls' father remains oblivious, pleading with Su-mi to be rational so that she doesn't become sick again. Finally, when Eun-joo discovers her pet bird killed in Su-yeon's bed, she snaps, and locks Su-yeon in the wardrobe as punishment even though she knows the girl is afraid of it. Su-mi discovers her sister later and promises that something like that will never happen again. Su-mi confronts her father about Eun-joo's behavior with Su-yeon. Her father yells, telling her that Su-yeon is dead and to get a hold of herself. Su-yeon screams and backs into a corner of the room while Su-mi denies her sister's death.

Later, Su-mi is locked in her room yelling for her sister, while Eun-joo paces and plots in her own room. Su-mi escapes from her room and begins to look for Su-yeon only to find a large bloodied bag that has been dragged through the hall. Su-mi tries to open it and leaves for a knife to cut it with, but when she returns it is gone. While searching for the bag she encounters Eun-joo who is now trying to kill her. The two fight and Su-mi is knocked out. She awakens and Eun-joo prepares to crush her with a heavy statue, but is interrupted when the father returns home. The father comes upon Su-mi and sets her down on a couch, telling her to wait while he steps out of the room.

Into the room walks Eun-joo, and we realize that Su-mi has been imagining that she is her stepmother and that she has been hallucinating the presence of her sister, who is in fact dead: In a flash-back we see their mother commit suicide in the wardrobe, which fell and crushed Su-yeon when she discovered the dead body while Eun-joo and Su-mi argued. Though Eun-joo discovered Su-yeon before she died, she did nothing to help her. We also see Su-mi, hallucinating that she is her stepmother attacking her sister, "kill" a doll, stuff it in a sack and put it in the wardrobe. Su-mi is returned to the psychiatric hospital, where her father and stepmother visit to try and comfort her.

The film ends in the house with Eun-joo discovering a ghostly presence; it apparently kills her though we cannot be sure. We also see Su-mi grieving over her sister's death; the movie makes it clear that Su-Yeon was not present when the father took Su-mi back home.

[edit] Explanation

The film's fractured narrative and severely unreliable narratress can make it difficult to piece together, and several key plot elements go unexplained. The narrator is Su-mi who is later revealed to be mentally ill and therefore dubious in her account of the story.

Though we are led to believe in the beginning that the main action of the movie is a flash-back being told in the interview to the doctor, it in fact proceeds mainly chronologically; the "day" the doctor wants Su-mi to talk about is the day her mother and sister died.

The narrative is further confused because Su-mi hallucinates the presence of the stepmother and sometimes imagines that she is the stepmother. Thus, when it appears the father gives pills to Eun-joo, he is actually giving them to Su-mi; the stepmother's bizarre dinner behavior is actually Su-mi trying to act like her stepmother. This is further proven when Su-mi, Eun-joo, and Su-Yeon all begin their menstrual periods on the same day. Su-mi's guilt over Su-Yeon's death leads her to make instances where she must protect her sister. Su-mi kills the bird to provide her imagined stepmother with a reason to kill her sister, thus allowing her and Eun-joo to come to the film's climax of conflict between the two. The tent that the brother-in-law and his wife drive by in the road is nothing more than a tent set up by harvesters and is a common sight on Korean roads in the country. There are many unexplained elements in the movie, but fanatics of the film note that this is true with many Asian films and is one of the main reasons for its popularity; the viewer can make its own decisions about what exactly happened. There is a fear among fanatics that if there is an American remake, a concrete explanation will be presented and therefore detract from the film's ambiguity.

[edit] Unexplained elements

  • The girl under the kitchen sink. It is most likely that this is the ghost of Su-Yeon, since the girl wears a green dress that we see Su-Yeon wearing in a photograph.
  • The identity of the ghost who apparently attacks Eun-joo in the end, and whether or not it is related to the girl under the sink. Again it is most likely that this is Su-Yeon, due to the ghost's presence in the wardrobe as well as the sound of a baby in the background. This calls back to Su-Mi's dream, in which she sees her mother with the hand of Su-Yeon coming from the bottom of her dress.
  • Why the father insisted on keeping the wardrobe in which his wife and daughter died.
  • Whether or not the girls' mother did indeed commit suicide in the wardrobe. Brief shots, imagined or real, of the mother in a wooded area, apparently bloodied, may suggest she didn't die in the closet at all. Furthermore there are questions as to why she would hang herself where her young daughter would most certainly find her as well as the difficulty in hanging one's self in such an enclosed space.
  • Was the figure in the wardrobe a figment of Su-Yeon's imagination similar to her sisters vivid hallucinations? Perhaps in trying to 'save' her mother, the same way Su-Mi tries to save Su-Yeon in her hallucinations, she accidentally pulled the wardrobe down on top of herself.
  • Whether or not Eun-joo and the girls' father were having an affair before his wife died, and whether that was the reason for her suicide. It is suggested that Eun-joo came into the family's life as a nurse caring for the mother, who may have had cancer. That she might have been mentally ill as well is hinted by the pills that spill from the wardrobe when Su-Yeon pulls at her hanged mother.
  • Why the brother-in-law's wife has a sudden seizure, and why the ghost reveals itself to her. It is likely that the brother-in-law's wife was possessed by the spirit of Su-Yeon considering she hurls herself onto the floor and begins to suffocate similarly to how Su-Yeon was crushed under the wardrobe.
  • Su-mi's nightmare where a young girl is in the woods with her mother. She grabs her mother's arms and her own hands are bloodied when she draws them away. It is most likely that the girl is in fact Su-yeon, as Su-mi murmurs in her dream 'go away, Su-yeon' (juxtaposed with scenes of what actually happens in the dream). This dream may be interpreted as a metaphor for how Su-yeon's death is related to her mothers death, which is shown as a flash-back at the end of the movie. It is further suggested that the mother in the dream is, in fact, Su-yeon and when Su-mi reaches to save her sister, her hands become bloody; this signifies that the "blood is on her hands" and that she is responsible for her sister's death.
  • The presence of the bloody fish in the refrigerator.
  • And, in fact, it is not entirely clear that the father has remarried at all.

[edit] Trivia

  • In the original Korean Folktale, the sisters' names are Janghwa and Hongryeon (Rose Flower and Red Lotus). In the movie, they are Su-mi and Su-yeon (still mean Rose and Lotus).
  • Im Su-jeong (Su-mi) originally auditioned for the role of Su-yeon (played by Moon Geun-young).
  • Kim Ji-woon originally wanted Jun Ji-hyun to play Su-mi, but she refused it because she thought the script is too scary. Ironically, her next movie was a different horror movie, The Uninvited (2003).

[edit] The Korean Folk Tale

A father once had two beautiful daughters, Rose and Lotus. Soon after their birth, his first wife died. He grieved deeply over the loss, and was not able to remarry for many years. The girls grew without a mother. Finally, he decided that his daughters needed a mother. He remarried and his new wife had a son. The man was still very sad, and could not pay enough attention to his new wife. He often told stories of his first wife, which made her very jealous. She decided to get rid of the girls, who made her jealous of the man's first wife. She also thought maybe if they are dead, my husband will be able to move on.

One night she captured a rat, skinned it, and left it in Rose's bed. In the morning she told her husband that the girl had had a miscarriage. The father sent his daughter to close relatives to avoid a scandal and sent her stepbrother with her to accompany her. Once they were well away from their home, her stepbrother, enraged by what he believed Rose had done, told her that he was going to kill her. Rose threw herself into a lake and drowned.

That night Rose's sister, Lotus, started dreaming about Rose. In her dreams Rose told her she was a spirit now and warned her of their stepmother. Lotus asked her stepmother about what happened. The stepmother told her that her sister brought dishonor on the family and drowned herself. Lotus then found the lake and saw her sister's spirit there. She became so upset over losing her sister that she followed her fate.

Some time later, the province where the family lived got a new governor. When he arrived, he heard that all the previous governors died after two mysterious spirits came to them. But he was a strong, level-headed man and was not afraid. One night he woke and saw the sisters, and, instead of losing his mind and dying like all the others, he spoke to them. The sisters revealed the truth and he sent for the father and the stepmother. The stepmother showed him the cloth with the dead rat, but he didn't examine it closely enough to see what was really there. They were free to go.

Later that night, the girls came back and told him to look closer. He did so the next morning and realised that the stepmother had lied to him. He ordered her and her son to be executed and released the father.

The father found the lake and his daughters floating below the surface of the water. They looked as if they were sleeping, untouched by death. He buried them and mourned them and his own folly. Some years later he remarried a woman who was very kind. One night he dreamed that his daughters told him they were returning to him. In the morning, his third wife came to him carrying two flowers, a rose and a lotus. Nine months later she gave birth to two girls who looked identical to the dead sisters. The two girls were named Rose and Lotus, and everyone lived their lives in peace and happiness.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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