A Tale of Two Sisters
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A Tale of Two Sisters (Template:Ko-hhrm; lit. "Rose Flower, Red Lotus") is a 2003 South Korean psychological horror drama film written and directed by Kim Jee-woon. The film is inspired by a Joseon Dynasty era folktale entitled Janghwa Hongryeon jeon, which has been adapted to film several times. The plot focuses on a recently released patient from a mental institution who returns home with her sister, only to face disturbing events between her stepmother and the ghosts haunting their house - all of which are connected to a dark past in the family's history.
The film opened to very positive reviews from critics and won Best Picture at the 2004 Fantasporto Film Festival. It is both the highest-grossing Korean horror film and the first to be screened in American theatres.
Plot
A teenage girl, Su-mi (Im Soo-jung), is being treated for shock and psychosis in a mental institution. She is released and returns home to her family's secluded estate in the countryside with her father (Kim Kap-soo) and younger sister Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young), whom she is protective over. The sisters have a cold reunion with their stepmother, Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah).
Su-mi has a nightmare of her late mother's ghost. The next day, she finds family photos which reveal that Eun-joo was formerly an in-home nurse for her then-terminally ill mother. She discovers bruises on her sister's arms and angrily confronts Eun-joo about the abuse. That night, their uncle and his wife arrive for dinner and Eun-joo tells bizarre stories that bewilder them. The uncle's wife suffers a violent seizure and tells her husband that she saw the ghost of a young girl beneath the kitchen sink. When Eun-joo is in the kitchen alone, a ghost girl is seen watching her in the background.
After finding her pet bird dead and seeing defaced photos of herself, Eun-joo locks Su-yeon in the closet. Su-mi releases her hysterical sister and is confronted by their father, who begs her to stop acting out. She retorts that he is blind to Eun-joo's abuse against Su-yeon. Her father tells her that Su-yeon is dead but Su-mi refuses to believe it.
The next morning, Eun-joo drags a bloodied sack through the house, whipping it. Su-mi believes that Su-yeon is inside the sack and she and Eun-joo and Su-mi get into a violent physical altercation. Su-mi's father arrives to find an injured Su-mi unconscious.
It is ultimately revealed that Su-mi and her father were alone in the house the entire time. Su-yeon and Eun-joo were merely hallucinatory manifestations of Su-mi's dissociative identity disorder. Throughout the film, Su-mi simultaneously switched personalities, acting as herself and Eun-joo. She hallucinated Su-yeon as a result of not being able to accept her death. In her "Eun-joo" mode, Su-mi imagined scenarios where she impersonates Eun-joo "abusing Su-yeon" but in reality injures herself to act out these situations. The bloodied sack simply contains a porcelain doll.
The father and the real Eun-joo, a much different woman from the imaginary version, send Su-mi back to the mental institution. That night, Eun-joo hears footsteps in Su-yeon's old bedroom. Simultaneously, Su-mi hears a mysterious whistling and recognizes it as Su-yeon - this contrasts her delusion of Su-yeon, who was unable to whistle, thereby confirming that the one who whistled is the real ghost of Su-yeon. Su-yeon's real ghost crawls out of the closet and kills Eun-joo, finally getting her revenge. Su-mi smiles, appearing to have finally found peace.
Flashbacks reveal the day that led Su-mi to be institutionalized. Her father and Eun-joo, who was still the nurse of their mother at the time, arrive home, announcing their engagement. This upsets the sisters and Su-yeon discovers that their mother hanged herself in Su-yeon's closet, depressed by the news. She attempts to revive her mother, causing the closet to collapse on top of her and slowly crush her to death. Eun-joo walks in and is about to save Su-yeon but encounters Su-mi, who engages in a heated confrontation with her. Angry at Su-mi's insults, Eun-joo decides to leave Su-yeon to die and tells Su-mi that she'll "regret this moment." Su-mi leaves the house, unaware of both her sister and her mother's conditions.
See also
