A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

Directed & Written by Kim Jee-woon
Music by Byung-woo Lee
Cast: Im Su-jeong, Mun Geun-yeong, Yeom Jeong-ah & Kim Kap-su

2003/114 mins/Color/DTS ES
1.85:1 anamorphic/Korean/Korea/NTSC Region 1

Review from the Tartan US DVD

Before I go on with my review of Kim Jee-woon's A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, i'd like to say that it is by far one of the best if not the best film I have seen this year and that i'll try as hard as I can not spoil too many things for those who haven't seen it. The film starts at the end... Su-Mi (superbly played by Im Su-jeong) is in a mental institute where she is about to tell to a pathologist what happened before she had to enter this place...

Su-Mi and her sister, Su-Yeon (Mun Geun-yeong), are back to the house of their father (Kim Kap-su) which is located in the moutains near a lake. Its a creepy and isolated Victorian-Korean mansion. Both seems kinda happy to be back to the house were they grew up but things turns sour when they meet their mother in law, played by Yeom Jeong-ah. The first night they spend sleeping there, Su-Yeon feels the presence of someone in her room, she is too afraid to take a look so she goes deeper into her bed sheets. Strange things are starting to happen in and around the house, like the birds of the stepmother are found death, a guess has an epileptic attack and sees something under the kitchen sink... and the tension really begins between the stepmother and the two sisters making things all the more confusing for the neglected father.

If you haven't seen the film and want to you should stop reading this review right now as it like impossible to review this film without giving away some vital and important pieces of the story. What first looks like another post RING film turns itself into a demented and confusing world of psychiatric sickness. The audience is forced to reconstruct various time sequences and scenes to figure out which one were real and/or imagined... confused?! Well you should be, this is the kind of film that is worth multiple viewing to find out all the little details that first slipped us by.

The film has three climatic scenes; the first one shows us that some of the characters are not really who they are, the second climax is a creepy and haunting sequence for the character of the stepmother and that intriguing closet and the third one let us know the origins of the psychological trauma from the main character.

The film is more or so a retelling of a famous Korean story about Janghwa and Hongryun, which tells how two sisters ended up dead because of their stepmother. This is Kim Jee-woon's third film, he previously gave us the brilliant THE QUIET FAMILY. A TALE OF TWO SISTERS is a work of art like no other film. Everything in the film is pure magic... or madness. The story is involving and intriguing, the acting is flawless, the set and costumes are pure eye candy and the mood and atmosphere gets creepier and more haunting as the minutes goes by.

Tartan US is releasing the movie in selected theaters in late December 2004 and on DVD in early 2005. Check out the Official English web site for more infos, trailer and stills.