Movies - A Tale of Two Sisters

Home > Listing Index > Movies > A Tale of Two Sisters

	Movies - A Tale of Two Sisters

A Tale of Two Sisters (장화홍련 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.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for A Tale of Two Sisters ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article A Tale of Two Sisters; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay