A Tale of Two Sisters
Poster for "A Tale of Two Sisters"
IMDB rating	{{{imdb_rating}}}
Directed by	Kim Ji-woon
Produced by
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
Released	June 13, 2003 (South Korea)
Runtime	115 mins.
Language	Korean
Budget
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MPAA rating	{{{mpaa_rating}}}
IMDb profile
Korean name
Hangul:	장화,홍련
Hanja:	葬花,紅蓮
Revised Romanization:	Janghwa, Hongryeon
McCune-Reischauer:	Changhwa, Hongnyŏn

A Tale of Two Sisters (장화, 홍련 Janghwa, Hongryeon) 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.

Main cast

• Soo-mi – Lim Su-jeong
• Soo-yeon – Moon Geun Young
• Eun-joo (Stepmother) – Yum Jung-ah
• Moo-hyeon (Father) – Kim Kap-su

Synopsis

• Tagline: Our sorrow was conceived long before our birth.

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

Story

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 step-mother, 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 upstairs 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 floorboards 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 a snack, 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 tampons; on the way back Eun-joo stops her. She laughs upon learning of Su-yeon's first period, saying how funny it is because hers 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 downstairs 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 girl's paternal uncle and his wife come to visit. At dinner and with the girls upstairs, 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 his 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, stuffing Su-yeon into a sack and beating her to death and placing her body in the wardrobe. The girls' father comes upon her 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 flashback we see their mother commit suicide in the wardrobe, which fell and crushed Su-yeon when she discovered the 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.

Explanation

The film's fractured narrative and severely unreliable narrator 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 flashback 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, in a plot device similar to one used in Fight Club. 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 begins their periods on the same day. Su-mi's guilt over Su-Yeon's death leads her to create 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 inexplained elements in the movie, but fans 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 his or her own decisions about what exactly happened. There is a fear among fans that if there is an American remake, a concrete explanation will be presented and therefore take away from the film's ambiguity.

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 which 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 almost certainly find her as well as the difficulty in hanging oneself 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 mother's hung body.

• 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 she is younger and is in the woods with her mother. She grabs her mother's arms and when she brings it away, it's bloody.

• The presence of the bloody fish in the refrigerator.

• And, in fact, it is not entirely clear that the father has remarried at all.

External links

• Official site (In Korean)
• Official site for American release
• A Tale of Two Sisters at The Internet Movie Database