How To Make a Truly Terrifying Fairy-tale
A Tale of Two Sisters, or, to translate its title literally, Rose Flower, Red Lotus, is a Korean psychological horror movie released in 2003, the same year that Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder came out. Everyone must have really taken their vitamins and eaten their vegetables the year before, because WOW that is a strong set of films for one year. Two Sisters, from I Saw the Devil and The Good, The Bad the Weird director Kim Jee-woon, is a masterful exercise in building tension to create a true sense of horror.
And I say horror because boy, this movie was scary. I can always tell when something is effectively frightening me, because I frequently turn the sound down to almost mute, and only watch one corner of the screen, to avoid the full shock of anything nasty that I expect to jump out at me at any moment. Two Sisters? At least 50% of it was watched from behind the ear of my giant Koya plushy (it’s a BTS thing, the face of a sleepy koala, google it), with pretty much no sound. I will freely admit that there’s every chance I missed some great dialogue due to cowering, but the power of this film luckily managed to override that.
In YouTube channel Spikima’s great video on the topic, they explain how this film uses various technical elements (colour palette, set design, lighting etc) to create a whole experience that is frightening, rather than simply one shot or one scene. It’s a great analysis, because this is definitely a film that is entirely rather than partially unsettling. There is no scene where we can fully break from the sense of the eerie that this film starts with, and no moment that feels safe. This is the most amazing feat of A Tale of Two Sisters.
I mentioned in my beginning that the literal Korean translation of this title is Rose Flower, Red Lotus (장화, 홍련) because this story actually has its origins in an ancient traditional Korean tale from the Joseon era. Even if you’ve literally never heard the word ‘Joseon’ before, this context can let you know that this story has the air of the mythic or fairy-tale about it. The film itself concerns a young girl, Su-mi, who has recently been released from a mental institution due to some unspecified traumatic incident (I wonder if we’ll find out what it was), to return to the isolated country home of her father and new stepmother, alongside her vulnerable younger sister Su-yeon. Both girls (as well as the audience) are mistrustful of the strange, spiky stepmother Eun-joo, whose behaviour only becomes more and more strange as the movie continues. Not long into the film we are plunged into the first night, full of mysterious noises, figures skulking in corridors, and general shady business.
This is a story of haunted houses, ghosts, and an evil woman usurping the place of a venerated but lost mother. As I said, total fairy-tale territory. The notions of hauntings and ghosts stand in fairly obviously for symbols of trauma and violent histories that have not been fully comprehended. So to does the stepmother figure often represent a dangerous, evil warping of the family unit, an undoing of the saintly role of motherhood with more wicked and base aims. Not really a fair representation in like, any way, but we’re talking about ancient myths here. Being understanding hadn’t been invented yet.
In the myth that this film was based on, the two virtuous daughters of a king with an evil second wife both end up dead, one as a result of trickery on the stepmother’s part, seeing her stepdaughter as a threat to her own son’s chances at power. These daughters become vengeful ghosts, seeking the unveiling of the truth that led to their demise. Again, symbolism of unresolved trauma much? It’s all here in the source material.
Whilst Two Sisters is by no means a direct retelling of this story, there are nods and echoes aplenty. The sisters in the folk tale drown in a pond: there is a delightful little lake that the sisters bathe their feet in at the start of the film. Dead animal carcasses feature in the undoing of the virtuous princess (again, please google it, its gross and I don’t want to explain): we see the remains of a fish and an ex-budgie in this movie. The stepmother of the fairy tale is cruel and self-serving: whilst it could be debated whether Eun-joo in this movie is really working for herself, or else has other issues she (or perhaps someone else) needs to deal with, she is undoubtedly unkind and occasionally sadistic to her stepdaughters.
All of these elements lend a sense of the otherworldly to this claustrophobic tale, told almost entirely inside a huge, corridor-ridden house seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It reminded me of 2020’s The Call, a maze of rooms and hallways that only offer foreboding in their shadowiness. As Spikima points out, the contrast of vivid colours with earthy tones indicate the contrast between different perceptions of reality, with an additional ingenious use of patterns, mirrors, and repeated actions to suggest a sense of doubling, and a maddening one at that. I don’t feel it would be fair to totally reveal the hand that this film is playing in this regard (though to be fair I’ve gone pretty far already, soz), but these visual motifs are cleverly woven into the very fabric of the film to indicate its core plot points before we ever discover them.
The fear in this film comes from the expert application of all these ideas, along with a sense of patience that is lacking from lesser ‘scary’ films. My favourite film critic, horror aficionado Mark Kermode (hello to Jason Isaacs), describes these lazy attempts at horror as ‘quiet quiet bang’ movies, relying on the simple knee-jerk response of jumping at a loud noise to create tension, rather than like, you know, skill. During Two Sisters, I was constantly on edge, waiting for the moment that the quiet lulls would suddenly pivot to a violent image, a loud noise, a gruesome moment. When the lights went out, I was waiting for the ghoulish faces jumping from corners.
And this is not to say that there are no sudden jump cuts in this movie, no stomach-drop ‘what the ever-loving fuck is behind her’ shots. The scene where the aunt recounts what she saw under the sink whilst having a fit at the dinner party (it’s a horror movie, just accept the scenario and move on), is probably the most instantly frightening of the whole film. But this film, like the best of them, knows what you expect, and drags the terror out in much smarter ways.
Take, for example, the scene I personally found most disturbing. Like Halloween, this scene imaginatively takes place in broad daylight, here even going as far as taking place in the early morning. The horror convention of ‘it’s light, so nothing bad can happen’ is truly subverted as Su-mi, waking up drowsily, sees a dark figure at the foot of her bed, who proceeds to hover ever closer over her, eventually appearing as her mother, white face, stringy black hair and blood all included. Whilst this is ultimately a dream, it is entirely terrifying in refusing to rely on sound or darkness for fear. Instead we are simply faced with the unnerving, gradually getting closer and closer to us in a suffocating way that we can’t escape.
Close-ups and panning shots are very much the bread and butter that make this movie so full-on. So many scenes centre around shots entirely taken up with a character’s face, displaying their fear and confusion about the strange goings on around them. We also get a lot of shots beginning in this way that swing around to reveal what is behind, or around, and whilst not always revealing something specific, add a very theatrical sense of suspense to quite simple moments in the narrative.
Ultimately, that’s what A Tale of Two Sisters is. A theatrical ghost story, playing on our expectations and emotions to create a truly edge-of-the-seat experience. Of course, I could go in to more critical detail of the representation of female mental illness in this film- let’s just say I’m going to guess this isn’t a fully accurate depiction of psychosis, trauma response, or the other major illness depicted in the film- but that is honestly outside my place to comment on knowledgeably. I would say that this film is a fantastically inventive re-working of a traditional fairy-tale, upping the horror elements in the most skilled way without ever relying on laziness or cheap tricks. This film is genuinely a very frightening watch, so do be warned, but A Tale of Two Sisters has a rightful place in the pantheon of East Asian horror classics.
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