You wish to let go of them, but they refuse to leave. You want to move on in life, but you cannot achieve this desired end because they cling onto you like a ghost. This message uttered by the stepmother of Su-Mi, the elder-sister figure, in the film A Tale of Two Sisters, becomes the tagline to which we must cling, if we are to understand the boggling mind-twists and meandering scares in the film directed by Kim Jee-Won, formerly director of the Korean segment, Memories, in the international Asian collaboration Three. The true horror lies not in the apparitions that are sighted in the film, but rather their import as significations of the gamut of innate existential feelings running from guilt, remorse, through responsibility to hatred and vengeance.

The film starts at the end of things, in a mental asylum as a pathologist interrogates Su-Mi by the acronym of "Hong Reon"(Red Lotus), telling her to retell him what transpired before she entered into the asylum. A sounding cue with loud orchestral music in the background signals a flashback into the past, a sketchy terrain of memories haunting her consciousness as she takes us-the audience-through the torturous experiences of her and her younger sister, Su-Yeon, being rejected by their father in affection and abused by their stepmother. Inverting chronological time sequences, which are essential to the structure of denouement laid out in Classical moviemaking conventions, pertinent especially to the West, and commercial Eastern cinema, this initial move but represents the first step in the film towards de-familiarizing the audience's sense of time present and time past.

Indeed, in the light of the direction in which the plot unfolds, this de-familiarization promises more than just cheap scares; instead, the audience is forced to reconstruct the various time sequences and to figure out for themselves which ones are real or imagined. Amidst a plot of a neurotic stepmother who is always thinking that the two sisters have invited some unfriendly spiritual presence into the house, and the two sisters each having their own visions of ghostly apparitions of their late mother, ending eventually in Su-Yeon's brutal murder by her stepmother, the alternate plot of Su-Mi having hallucinated all these as a part of her split personality unfolds. The audience, however, is not allowed to realize this until the very end of the film, where the director keeps the suspense with the constant sighting of apparitions by Su-Mi and her sister, the stepmother and other members of the family, as well as the unfolding imaginary plot of a murderous stepmother. First creaking doors with pale hands holding onto them, then ghastly bodies of women dressed in green, black or blue with disheveled hair and bleeding menstrual blood dripping grotesquely over their legs and bodies. First Su-Mi's dream of her late mother clutching her right arm with a bloodied palm before she "wakes up" to another horrid nightmare of a menstruating she-ghost, then flowing trails of blood on the floor traced out by a bag containing a bloodied corpse which the stepmother seemingly drags through the living room. Constant dissolves of the scenes one into another, sudden jump cuts and alternating narrative sequences, become disorientating to the effect that the line between hallucination and psychological sanity, as experienced in these various reflections of Su-Mi's tortured psyche, becomes blurred out.

Yet beyond being a mere psychological tour-de-force, shocking the audience and throwing them into disarray by suturing together disjunctive and violently sharp images of blood and gore, the film moves itself into the exploration of what it means to live in the shadow of the past. The true ghosts are within, not without the self; they are not in the environment one lives in, but projections of one's fears and desires onto the environment. Photos of the past, which Su-Mi obtains from the warehouse located at a distance from her home, bear reminders to us that her dementia is hardly occasional but almost a premeditated result of her father's extramarital affair with his medical assistant, the stepmother-to-be. An uncanny contrast created between happier birthday photos with her younger sister, her father and her late mother, and others where the stepmother-figure starts to intrude like a strange nanny figure into the picture lie among these jarring images that remind us that the director is dealing essentially not just with a self that sees images it wants to see, but that sympathetically, it is victimized by its family past. Even the physical presence of her younger sister Su-Yeon throughout the whole film is another construct of her imagination, created in order to handle the implacable guilt she feels at being unable to save her sister from dying of shock at the sight of their late mother's suicide. Tied inseparably to her younger sister by a sibling bond, as they enter and trudge together through the dark alleys and chambers of their Victorian-Korean style mansion, these series of sisterly images become representations of the past, namely the sibling she lost, which become attached to her as her shadow-ghost.

Similarly, it is bizarre that for all the efforts of the film to affix the names of "Hong Reon"(the Korean for "red lotus," or "hong lian" in Chinese) and "Jang Hoa"(the Korean for "rose," or "qiang hua" in Chinese) to the elder and younger sisters respectively, through the numerous advertisement posters and trailers, little or no mention is made of these two names at all inside the narrative proper. The motive of the director could have been metonymic more than literal, insofar as the two flowers ironize the emotional and psychological poises that his two characters have to undergo. While beautiful and exuding a sweet fragrance, the rose flower pricks the fingers of its holders and is also a fragile flower at the mercy of the elements. The red(or pink) lotus, ironically a common symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism for its representations of a passivity that transcends the mundane human condition, highlights similarly the inability of Su-Mi as the elder sister to transcend the condition of her abuse by the stepmother as much as she resists with hatred and vengeance. For she is left to the bars of the asylum like the very parrot reared by her stepmother and which she killed, doomed to existence within a cage forever.

The psycho-sexual elements prevalent in the narrative plot of a dysfunctional family add to the colour of the film in portraying obsession on a familial scale. It is not surprising in the light of other blockbuster films which have been released years back on the cinema screen in South Korea years back, such as Whispering Corridors (Yeo-Go-Kwei-Dam, 1998), and Memento Mori (Yeo-Go-Kwei-Dam 2, 1999), both of which deal with the theme of lesbian obsession and unusually obsessive friendships between high school girls and their classmates and teachers. By contrast, A Tale of Two Sisters brings this theme of obsession to a feverish pitch, filling in the gaps of narrative to suggest an Electra complex between the sisters and their father. We see one scene as Su-Mi's father slips off to sleep by himself, and Su-Mi, hearing footsteps below her room, steps out into the kitchen. Passing by her father, she covers him with a blanket and then tried caressing his right cheek with her hand while he is asleep. The appearance of the stepmother at this point is no less startling, as she drifts in like a ghost with unheard footsteps, and tells off Su-Mi, "I told you not to disturb him!" Suggestions of a rivalry between the stepmother and Su-Mi are rife in such scenes of confrontation as the plot(s) unfolds.

Also, the sibling bond between Su-Mi and Su-Yeon borders uneasily on a lesbian relationship of narcissistic self-reflection and domination. Su-Mi wakes up from multiple nightmares of menstrual blood and gore associated with her late mother to find that Su-Yeon is going through a period as she sleeps alongside her, and she rushes secretly into her stepmother's room to find tampons for Su-Yeon. The stepmother speaks uncannily with an airy laugh, "Strange, that we actually have periods on the same day," this a self-reflexive indication within the film that her presence as the evil stepmother and Su-Yeon's presence as the weaker-willed sister are both imaginary constructs of Su-Mi's tormented psyche.

"Every family has its own dark secrets"-the clichéd advertisement thus goes to promote an image of a plot revolving around a dysfunctional family trapped in the space of a Victorian-Korean mansion. Yet above the common clichés of a haunted house, two ghostly sisters, a neurotic stepmother, and various apparitional sightings, the film A Tale of Two Sisters unveils profounder meaning with its themes of a family betrayal ending in implacable guilt and remorse, and the desire to end it all through false hallucinations and concocted plots of gruesome murder. The true burden here lies not in dying or being killed by paranormal presences as in most conventional horror films replete with their fair share of ghastly faces and bodies, but in the knowledge that living is the true horror, where one is unable to cathartically exorcise one's fears and own inner demons. In that final freeze frame image of Su-Mi stepping out of the mansion in a fit of rage against her stepmother, the devastating sense of existential guilt and resignation is best shown: Su-Mi, as we all know by now, has to return to the dour news of her sister's death on top of her mother's suicide, and her escape from the house is but a short respite-an imagined liberation found only in death.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002