A Tale of Two Sisters

Su-mi and her younger sister Su-yeon return from a psychiatric hospital to their family's isolated lakeside home, where their taciturn father and his new wife, Eun-joo, await them. Su-mi is fiercely protective of Su-yeon and immediately hostile to the stepmother, who seems cold, controlling, and cruel. Strange things begin happening in the house: Su-yeon sees a terrifying figure crouched under her bed; at a dinner party, a guest suddenly convulses as though seeing something no one else can. The atmosphere thickens with dread.

The film withholds its truth carefully. What the audience witnesses — Su-mi defending her sister, confrontations with the stepmother, apparitions in the night — is only gradually revealed to be a deeply distorted version of reality. Su-yeon is dead. She died in a devastating accident: their mother had taken her own life, and in the chaos that followed, a heavy wardrobe collapsed onto Su-yeon and trapped her. Eun-joo heard Su-yeon's cries and did nothing, leaving her to die. Su-mi, unable to bear what she had lost and consumed by guilt over her own failure to save her sister, dissociated. She created Su-yeon in her mind, and some of what we have witnessed is Su-mi playing both roles.

The ghost haunting the house is Su-yeon — or it is Su-mi's grief given form, or both at once. The film does not distinguish. After the truth surfaces, the stepmother is left alone with what she did: Su-yeon's apparition comes for her, relentless and without mercy. Su-mi is returned to the institution. The father remains passive and destroyed. The house stands empty. Whatever lived in it has not finished.