Director: Jee-woon Kim
Writer: Jee-woon Kim
Stars: Kap-su Kim, Jung-ah Yum, Soo-jung Lim
Koean, subtitles, 1 hour, 55 minutes
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We start in a mental institution. The doctor shows the girl seated there a picture of a family. “Do you know who these are? Will you talk about what happened that day?” He asks. She doesn’t answer. We flash back to “that day.”
Father parks the car at the house, and the two girls get out. Su-Yeon eats some kind of nasty-looking fruit, and Su-Mi reads her palms, but doesn’t like what she sees. They finally go inside the house, and their stepmother greets them. “You’re both feeling better, right?” She asks.
There’s an awkward dinner with the two girls, the father, and the stepmother. Su-Yeon hears noises outside in the night, which keep her awake, so she crawls into bed with Su-Mi. The next morning, Su-Mi sees a figure in black crawling on the floor of her room. It’s like a woman with a broken neck. The next morning, all three women in the house are having their period at the same time.
Su-Yeon goes through some old pictures, including the one we saw in the institution. It’s a photo of her mother and father, and both girls. There’s also a photo of the four of them with the stepmother standing nearby. There is some family drama as the stepmother and Su-Mi argue.
Father and stepmother have another couple over for dinner, and it’s even more awkward. The stepmother tells old stories that the guests claim they don’t remember. The woman guest then has some kind of fit and goes into convulsions. She screams and pukes all over the floor, and her husband gives her some pills. After they leave, the stepmother sees a ghostly girl in the dining room. After that, she’s convinced there’s something in the house.
The father finds his pet birds dead and bloodied in their cage. The stepmother finds Su-Mi’s photos, but Su-Mi has cut her out of all the pictures. Stepmother locks Su-Yeon inside the wardrobe in the bedroom. Su-Mi eventually comes in and releases her.
Father comes in and demands to know why Su-Mi has been acting so strangely. Su-Mi explains that Stepmother has been harassing Su-Yeon. Father says to stop saying those things, because we all know Su-Yeon is dead. On the other hand, Su-Yeon is standing right there next to Su-Mi. Someone is confused. Su-Yeon starts screaming.
Next morning, we see Stepmother dragging a corpse-sized bloody sack out of the house. She stops and beats on it angrily. Su-Mi can’t find Su-Yeon now, but there is a long trail of blood on the floor. Su-Mi and the Stepmother fight. Su-Mi gets knocked out.
Father finds Su-Mi unconscious and bloody on the floor, but no one else is around. We see Father bandaging wounds on Stepmother, and Su-Mi is nowhere to be found. Just then the door opens, and the real stepmother walks in and sees Su-Mi sitting there alone. If you aren’t figuring it out a little, the movie is very confusing by this point. Su-Mi is real; Su-Yeon has been dead for years, and the real stepmother just arrived; she hadn’t been real either until now.
As she sits in the institution, she remembers what caused all this. Meanwhile, the real stepmother is at home and hears strange noises. She goes into a room that is freezing cold. The door slams, and the lights go out. The black broken-necked ghost appears and kills her.
Finally, we get a flashback explaining what happened. Father and Stepmother were having an affair, and real Mother found out about it. Real Mother hung herself in the wardrobe. Su-Yeon found the body and then panicked and knocked the wardrobe over onto herself, which crushed her to death. The mother and Su-Yeon have appeared as the scary-looking ghosts, while the non-scary Su-Yeon and most of the appearances by the stepmother were all inside Su-Mi’s head.
Commentary
It’s all right. I immediately suspected that one of the girls wasn’t real, but the imaginary stepmother kept talking to both of them, which made it confusing. Having two imaginary characters made it much harder to figure out, and then there were ghosts as well. It’s not clear why the party guest had the seizure, and what was up with the tent in the road?