21 Days of Spooky: A Tale of Two Sisters (Kim Jee-woon, 2003)

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21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: Kim Jee-woon's A Tale of Two Sisters. Some spoilers ahead.

What's it about?: A girl is released from her stay in a mental institution and sent back home, where she must deal with her dad, her evil step-mother, and her little sister. Things go murky when she realizes the stepmom might actually be trying to kill the girls.

Evil step-mother tales abound from the dawn of time, with classics like Snow White usually getting this treatment, making the stepmom being the same witch with the poisoned apple that only wants Snow White dead because reasons. So, it's not much of a surprise to see this spin in Korean films, but rarely the tale portrays the heroic daughter as a flaking figure, someone who we could doubt the veracity of her tale, only for the story itself having to prove us wrong... or right, depending the situation. And, if we can make the step-mother a weird person, and the daughter someone who's plagued by ghosts, the better.

That's how we get A Tale of Two Sisters, the sisters in question being Su-mi (Im Soo-jung), the teenager released from a mental institution for psychosis, and Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young), the little sister and light of Su-mi's eyes. Our main character hasn't been very well mentally since the death of her mom, and got worse after her dad married the mom's nurse, Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah). Eun-joo isn't necessarily a top class person, much less when she shares weird stories during dinner with relatives and, well, gets haunted by ghosts hidden in cupboards. This house is a quite haunted one, most likely by dead mom.

Dead mom also stops to visit Su-mi in her sleep, broken neck and all, and plants her the idea that Eun-joo not only killed her, but is also planning to do the same to Su-yeon, making Su-mi spring into action. Domestic violence is no joke, hence why you feel for Su-mi when Su-yeon disappears and Eun-joo is caught dragging a large bloodied sack through the house, or earlier when she spots bruises in the little girl's arms but Su-yeon doesn't want to tell who did them to her. Her pet bird dies, photos get trashed, she gets yelled and talked down to. Su-mi is a log right in the middle of the murder plan truck.

Wouldn't you stand up for those who needed it the most, even when powerless? And, even worse, how long has the abuse been happening? We're told Su-mi was in the institution for a long time, and Su-yeon is shy enough to not verbalize the dangerous situations she's been put through under her oblivious dad's care. But what can a teenager do to stop that? Su-mi can only yell and confront whenever possible, the tension racketing throughout the film due to the unsustainable situation she's faced with.

The step-mother seems aloof, how can she stress enough power in the family dynamics to hurt an adorable little child? Su-yeon can't even whistle, as much as she tries! And that's not even counting with the possibility of Eun-joo actually having killed the girls' mom. The film takes us on this really frightening ride of children who can't really defend themselves and, when they do, might end up taken to a mental institution in order to get them out of the way (which, is implied, happened already once before the events of the film). The house is secluded, and the only relatives end up getting ghost spooked. Damn.

The film doesn't help you with the uneasiness, with Kim choosing to show us most scenes from Su-mi's perspective, hiding the veracity of the accusations so you never know if Su-mi's right in believing Eun-joo is an abuser and a murderer, or it's just the ramblings of an affected teenager.

Well, you do actually get to know that answer in the final act, but I'm gonna keep my promise not to spoil the endings. If the premise sounds familiar to you, it might have been because it was remade in the US as The Uninvited, a terrible 2009 flick that still follows some of the plot beats of the original. So, if you've watched that one, you may be clued on how Sisters ends... albeit obviously much, much better.

Tomorrow: An apple a day keeps "The Accident" segment of Southbound away.