A couple of years ago, shudders ran through the online horror community when it was rumored that DreamWorks was producing a remake of Kim Ji-Won's A Tale of Two Sisters, with the Olsen twins. The twins part turned out to be false but the remake proved fact, and after a very long production period, the result is finally hitting screens. The original Tale was pure genius, one of the earliest cross-over hits from Korea; its American redux, helmed by first time directors the Guard Brothers, ain't half-bad either even if its cast of Emily Browning (Lemony Snicket) and the Gilmore Girls bit player Arielle Kebbel seems about as promising as a kick in the head.
The story is about two sisters. After the death of their sick mother, one is bundled off to a mental institution for a ten-month rest. Returning home, she finds that Rachel, her mother's nurse (Elizabeth Banks), is dating her dad and worse, she can't remember what happened That Fateful Night When Everything Changed Forever. War is declared between new mommy and the two sisters, enlivened by a procession of dirty crawling things, things in bags, things under the cabinets and things that crawl into bed.
When Kim made A Tale of Two Sisters he was best known as the director of the black comedies like The Quiet Family and The Foul King, a huge hit about a mild-mannered banker who becomes a masked wrestler at night. Visually ravishing, Tale was a brightly colored scare flick with careful camera compositions, surreal angles and eye-searing production design. The wallpaper crawled with vines and flowers, fabrics are carefully chosen to carry through visual themes and every prop is burnished to an unearthly glow. If the story of Tale felt larded with J-horror devices that were tired even then, Kim somehow deployed them in a self-commenting way and ditched the goopy movie-horror for a finale full of believable emotional trauma. In Tale, the genre's tropes turned out to be the coping mechanisms of a traumatized young girl desperate to avoid confronting the truth. Not a bad idea.
Admittedly, the Guard Brothers are no Kim Ji-Won. Cursed with a shrieking sound design, their ghosties trudge through the movie with all the joy of panhandlers while the acting of the living is cranked to a point of Mommie Dearest hysteria. That said, the movie is short so the plot clicks along nicely, and while their movie doesn't come close to the high style of its source, the Guards do avoid flashy camera effects, turning in what might be the best looking American K-horror knock-off to date. Interestingly, they seem far more sure of themselves when dealing with psychological realism than flat-out scares and their finale too delivers some well-earned emotional shocks. Invite yourself to check them out.
Grady Hendrix is one of the founders and programmers of the New York Asian Film Festival. He writes about Asian film for Variety at Kaiju Shakedown and should have found something better to do with his life by now.
