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A Tale of Two Sisters
Poster for A Tale of Two Sisters
Directed by	Kim Ji-Woon
Written by	Kim Ji-Woon
Starring	Im Su-jeong Moon Geun-young Yeom Jeong-ah Kim Kap-su
Music by	Lee Byeong-wu
Cinematography	Lee Mo-Gae
Editing by	Go Im-pyo
Distributed by	Cineclick Asia Big Blue Film
Release date(s)	June 13, 2003
Running time	115 min.
Language	Korean
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile
Korean name
Hangul	장화,홍련
Hanja	薔花,紅蓮
Revised Romanization	Janghwa, Hongryeon
McCune-Reischauer	Changhwa, Hongnyŏn

A Tale of Two Sisters (장화, 홍련 Janghwa, Hongryeon literally 'Rose Flower, Red Lotus') is a 2003 South Korean psychological horror film. It was directed by Kim Ji-Woon and is both the highest-grossing Korean horror film and the first to be screened in American theatres. Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (600x861, 490 KB)A Tale of Two Sisters film poster File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Kim Ji-Woon, born in 1964, is a Korean film director with a strong sense of visual design. ... Im Su-jeong (born July 11, 1980) is a South Korean model and film actor. ... Moon Geun-young (born 6 May 1987 in Gwangju, South Korea) is a Korean actress. ... Yeom Jeong-ah (born July 28, 1972 in Seoul, South Korea) is a South Koream film actress. ... Kim Kap-su (born April 7, 1957) is a South Korean film actor. ... Go Im-pyo is a film editor in South Korea. ... Image File history File links Flag_of_South_Korea. ... is the 164th day of the year (165th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Jamo redirects here. ... Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. ... The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea. ... McCune-Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language romanization systems, along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which replaced (a modified) McCune-Reischauer as the official romanization system in South Korea in 2000. ... The year 2003 in film involved some significant events. ... Motto None (Unofficial: Broadly benefit humankind also translated as Devotion to the welfare of humanity) Anthem Aegukga Patriotic Hymn Capital (and largest city) Seoul Official languages Korean Government Presidential republic  -  President Roh Moo-hyun  -  Prime Minister Han Duck-soo Establishment  -  Liberation declared March 1, 1919 (de jure)   -  Liberation August 15... Horror Movie redirects here. ... Kim Ji-Woon, born in 1964, is a Korean film director with a strong sense of visual design. ...

The film is inspired by a Joseon Dynasty folktale entitled "Janghwa Hongreyon-jon", which has been adapted to film several times. An American remake was scheduled to begin production in 2004 and, after being delayed, is now back in development with preliminary casting announced. Territory of Joseon after Jurchen conquest of King Sejong Capital Hanseong Language(s) Korean Religion Neo-Confucianism Government Monarchy Wang  - 1392 - 1398 Taejo (first)  - 1863 - 1897 Gojong (last)1 Yeong-uijeong  - 1431 - 1449 Hwang Hui  - 1466 - 1472 Han Myeonghoe  - 1592 - 1598 Ryu Seongryong  - 1894 Kim Hongjip History  - Coup of 1388... This article or section contains a plot summary that is overly long or excessively detailed compared to the rest of the article. ... Year 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Taglines:

• Our sorrow was conceived long before our birth.
• Every family has its dark secrets.
• Fairy Tales have never been this Grimm.

Cast

Im Su-jeong (born July 11, 1980) is a South Korean model and film actor. ... Moon Geun-young (born May 6, 1987 in Gwangju, South Korea) is a South Korean actress. ... Yeom Jeong-ah (born July 28, 1972 in Seoul, South Korea) is a South Koream film actress. ... Kim Kap-su (born April 7, 1957) is a South Korean film actor. ...

Synopsis

Two girls discover a malignant force in their home while their stepmother's behavior becomes increasingly erratic.

Plot

The film opens in a psychiatric hospital, where a doctor is interviewing a young girl whose dark hair hangs over her face. He shows her photos of her family in an attempt to coax her into talking about "that day".

In an apparent flashback, we see a family arrive at their house in the country. Two girls, Su-mi and the younger Su-yeon, step out of the car and go off to play while their father walks into the house. Later, when they go inside, they are met by their new stepmother, Eun-joo. We learn that the girls' mother has died. Eun-joo tries to be conciliatory to them at first, but their clear resentment of and indifference to her drives her to become shrill and hectoring and she storms off.

Going upstairs, the girls find their rooms already filled with exact replicas of the clothing and things they have brought with them. The dinner conversation that night is brief and strained; the girls don't speak, and the father leaves early, handing Eun-joo two pills to take. She swallows them and scolds the girls, who leave.

That night Su-yeon is frightened by creaking floor-boards and her door opening by itself; she flees into her older sister's bed, telling her that someone came into her room. Su-mi gets up to investigate and finds her father asleep on the couch instead of with Eun-joo. She fixes his blanket, where she is interrupted by her stepmother, they then argue. Su-mi then goes into the kitchen for some water and goes back to bed, where she tells Su-yeon that it was their stepmother who frightened her.

Su-mi has a nightmare about a girl with long, stringy hair and bloody legs who steps into her bed. When she awakes she finds blood on the sheets and realizes that Su-yeon must be having her first menstruation. She goes to the master bedroom for towels and menstrual pads; on the way back Eun-joo stops her. She laughs upon learning of Su-yeon's first menstrual period, saying how funny it is because her own just started as well. Whilst returning to her bedroom, Su-mi realises that she herself has also started her period.

Later, Su-mi argues with her father, telling him to get rid of the wardrobe in her sister's room, but he refuses, insisting that she had promised not to bring it up.

That afternoon, Su-mi goes to an old conservatory, where she finds a trunk full of her late mother's things. She takes them back to her room and looks through the photographs. She finds that Eun-joo appears in them all, even family portraits from years past, as if she had been in their lives all along. She hides this discovery when Su-yeon walks in. Su-mi notices marks on her sister's arm, and Su-yeon admits they were caused by their stepmother.

Su-mi marches downstairs and confronts her stepmother, who calmly admits hurting Su-yeon to punish her. They fight loudly and her father comes downstairs, where he finds Su-mi alone and in tears, though she refuses to tell him what the commotion was about.

That night the girls' stepmother's brother (step-uncle) and his wife come to visit. At dinner and with the girls upstairs, Eun-joo launches into a bizarre story that supposedly occurred in her brother's youth; he quietly but angrily denies that it happened. Suddenly the uncle's wife has a seizure and sees a girl under the kitchen sink.

Matters in the house go from bad to worse, as Eun-joo takes to locking Su-yeon in her wardrobe and becomes increasingly nasty while the girls' father remains oblivious, pleading with Su-mi to be rational so that she doesn't become sick again. Finally, when Eun-joo discovers her pet bird killed in Su-yeon's bed, she snaps, and locks Su-yeon in the wardrobe as punishment even though she knows the girl is afraid of it. Su-mi discovers her sister later and promises that something like that will never happen again. Su-mi confronts her father about Eun-joo's behavior with Su-yeon. Her father yells, telling her that Su-yeon is dead and to get a hold of herself. With this revelation, Su-yeon screams and backs into a corner of the room while Su-mi denies her sister's death.

Later, Su-mi is locked in her room yelling for her sister, while Eun-joo paces and plots in her own room. Su-mi escapes from her room and begins to look for Su-yeon only to find a large bloodied bag that has been dragged through the hall. Su-mi tries to open it and leaves for a knife to cut it with, but when she returns it is gone. While searching for the bag she encounters Eun-joo who is now trying to kill her. The two fight and Su-mi is knocked out. She awakens and Eun-joo prepares to crush her with a heavy statue, but is interrupted when the father returns home. The father comes upon Su-mi and seats her on the couch, telling her to wait while he steps out of the room.

Into the room walks the real Eun-joo, and we realize that Su-mi has been imagining that she is her stepmother and that she has been hallucinating the presence of her sister, who is in fact dead. In a flashback we now see "Su-mi" dragging the bloodied sack, as well as a number of other scenes featuring Su-mi where we had previously believed it to be Eun-joo. The flashback ends and we next see Su-mi back in the psychiatric hospital, where her parents visit her.

After more flashbacks of Su-mi, her father, and her imagined stepmother and sister, as well as a scene of Su-yeon and her real mother, we see Eun-joo sitting at the dining room table. Hearing noises, she investigates Su-yeon's room where she is apparently killed by a ghostly presence that may or may not be the ghost of Su-yeon.

In the next flashback, we see the climactic apparent suicide of Su-mi and Su-yeon's real mother. Su-yeon awakes to find her mother dead in the wardrobe, having hanged herself. The wardrobe falls on Su-yeon, immobilizing and injuring her as well as making a large bang. Eun-joo walks into the room, but does nothing to help Su-yeon.

The film ends with Su-mi walking out of the house, ignoring her own curiosity about the sound. She seems guilty about not investigating the loud bang.

Explanation

The film's fractured narrative and severely unreliable narrative can make it difficult to piece together, and several key plot elements go unexplained. The narrator is Su-mi who is later revealed to be mentally ill and therefore dubious in her account of the story.

Though we are led to believe in the beginning that the main action of the movie is a flashback being told in the interview to the doctor, it in fact proceeds mainly chronologically; the "day" the doctor wants Su-mi to talk about is the day her mother and sister died.

The narrative is further confused because Su-mi hallucinates the presence of the stepmother and sometimes imagines that she "is" the stepmother. Thus, when it appears the father gives pills to Eun-joo, he is actually giving them to Su-mi; the stepmother's bizarre dinner behavior is actually Su-mi trying to act like her stepmother. This is further proven when Su-mi, Eun-joo, and Su-yeon all begin their menstrual periods on the same day. Su-mi's guilt over Su-yeon's death leads her to make instances where she must protect her sister. Su-mi kills the bird to provide her imagined stepmother with a reason to kill her sister, thus allowing her and Eun-joo to come to the film's climax of conflict between the two. It is also debatable as to whether Su-mi is really hallucinating the presence of her sister, or if she is interacting with Su-yeon's ghost (Su-yeon's actual ghost does seem to make an appearance at least once or twice in the film, although these appearances could also be explained as being hallucinations). The tent that the brother and his wife drive by in the road is nothing more than a tent set up by harvesters and is a common sight on Korean roads in the country. There are many unexplained elements in the movie, but fanatics of the film note that this is true with many Asian films and is one of the main reasons for its popularity; the viewer can make his/her own decisions about what exactly happened. There is a fear among fanatics that if there is an American remake, a concrete explanation will be presented and therefore detract from the film's ambiguity.

Unexplained elements

• The girl under the kitchen sink. It is most likely that this is the ghost of Su-Yeon, since the girl wears a green dress that we see Su-Yeon wearing in a photograph.

• The identity of the ghost who apparently attacks Eun-joo in the end, and whether or not it is related to the girl under the sink. Again it is most likely that this is Su-yeon, due to the ghost's presence in the wardrobe as well as the sound of a baby in the background. This recalls Su-mi's dream, in which she sees her mother with the hand of Su-Yeon coming from the bottom of her dress. It seems very likely that she is attacking Eun-joo due to the fact that she did nothing to help Su-yeon when she was crushed under the wardrobe.

• Why the father insisted on keeping the wardrobe in which his wife and daughter died.

• Whether or not the girls' mother did indeed commit suicide in the wardrobe. Brief shots, imagined or real, of the mother in a wooded area, apparently bloodied, may suggest she didn't die in the closet at all. Furthermore there are questions as to why she would hang herself where her young daughter would most certainly find her as well as the difficulty in hanging oneself in such an enclosed space.

• Was the figure in the wardrobe a figment of Su-yeon's imagination similar to her sisters vivid hallucinations? Perhaps in trying to 'save' her mother, the same way Su-mi tries to save Su-Yeon in her hallucinations, she accidentally pulled the wardrobe down on top of herself. A support for the theory of Su-Yeon's imagined mother in the wardrobe could be the pills which fall on the floor when she starts pulling her mother from the wardrobe. (just like Su-mi's pills that her father keeps giving to her)

• Whether or not Eun-joo and the girls' father were having an affair before his wife died, and whether that was the reason for her suicide. It is suggested that Eun-joo came into the family's life as a nurse caring for the mother, who may have had cancer. That she might have been mentally ill as well is hinted by the pills that spill from the wardrobe when Su-Yeon pulls at her hanged mother.

• Why the brother's wife has a sudden seizure, and why the ghost reveals itself to her. It is likely that the brother's wife was possessed by the spirit of Su-yeon considering she hurls herself onto the floor and begins to suffocate similarly to how Su-yeon was crushed under the wardrobe.

• Why did Su-mi (in her stepmother role) shout and lose control of herself when her step-uncle's wife, Mi-Hee, started to calm down after suffocating? Was Mi-Hee really possessed by Su-Yeon's spirit and she saw something?

• If we assume that the girl under the sink is Su-yeon's spirit and that Su-mi was "impostering" her stepmother, after the dinner incident with her step-uncle, why did Su-yeon reveal herself to her sister? And why was Su-mi's reaction to seeing her sister's spirit standing in front of her, simply staring?

• Su-mi's nightmare where a young girl is in the woods with her mother. She grabs her mother's arms and her own hands are bloodied when she draws them away. It is most likely that the girl is in fact Su-yeon, as Su-mi murmurs in her dream 'go away, Su-yeon' (juxtaposed with scenes of what actually happens in the dream). This dream may be interpreted as a metaphor for how Su-yeon's death is related to her mother's death, which is shown as a flashback at the end of the movie. It is further suggested that the mother in the dream is, in fact, Su-yeon and when Su-mi reaches to save her sister, her hands become bloody; this signifies that the "blood is on her hands" and that she is responsible for her sister's death.

• The presence of the bloody fish in the refrigerator.

• It is not entirely clear that the father ever did remarry after his wife's death.

• The chronology of the scenes is unclear.

• Why did the stepmother not help Su-yeon and her mother, who were stuck in/under the wardrobe?

Trivia

• In the original Korean Folktale, the sisters' names are Janghwa and Hongryeon (Rose Flower and Red Lotus). In the movie, they are Su-mi and Su-yeon (still mean Rose and Lotus).
• Im Su-jeong (Su-mi) originally auditioned for the role of Su-yeon (played by Moon Geun-young).
• Kim Ji-woon originally wanted Jun Ji-hyun to play Su-mi, but she refused it because she thought the script is too scary. Ironically, her next movie was a different horror movie, The Uninvited (2003).

Jun Ji-hyun (born Wang Ji-hyun 30 October 1981) is a South Korean actress and model. ... The Uninvited is a 2003 South Korean psychological horror film directed by Lee Su-yeon. ...

See also

• K-Horror

K-Horror is the term given to horror films made in Korea. ...

External links

• Official site (In Korean)
• Official site for American release
• A Tale of Two Sisters at the Internet Movie Database
• A Tale of Two Sisters at Metacritic