Exhuma
2024 Directed by Jang Jae-hyun
Horror Marathon Day 23 Film 47
What starts as a personal family tragedy soon begins to fester throughout society. A Korean female shaman (Kim Go-Eun) takes a trip to America to examine a newborn that bears a curse that goes back generations to his grandfather. To help exhume the body a geomancer (Cho Min-sik) is enlisted. The first 90 mins of the film is spent creating a sense of mythology and understanding of the mystical world they're working with. Logical leaps are tripped though- though I can see that there is some haste needed in getting rid of the curse the supernatural experts seem to bypass their intuition. The last act of the film is executes the story more through exposition than investigation. In short there's a lot of ideas here that needed to be edited.
There are some problems with the team unit- it doesn't help that the motivation of the supernatural team is mainly concerning the money that they're bilking out of customers- and the geomancer even says that a lot of the advice he gives is also to sell plots of land that aren't as well suited as South Korea simply doesn't have a lot of great areas to give the best burials. The kill scenes are lackluster in the first half- with barely spooky setups and jumbled back and forth from Korea to America, and the plot seems to meander into various ideas of other films- mixing in exorcism and general ghostly tropes together with varying degrees of good to campy performance (including Kwaidan’s Buddhist scripture). The best aspects are probably with the ritualistic scenes themselves- delivering most of the high energy ecstatic performances from the main cast. Spoilers follow:
During the second half of the film the narrative twists to national trauma based on the splitting of Korea itself- this 38th parallel is pointed out by the geomancer as a literal piercing of the earth by mystical Japanese forces before the Japanese occupation of Korea still carries a lot of emotional weight (only briefly mentioned is a Korean folk tale about Japanese occupation using metal rods to disrupt the country's feng shui). This is embodied in a horrific Japanese Samurai General to protect the rods that's decently characterized as a big movie monster. This reminded me of how narrative conventions create reality in movies- like Russians being the bad guy in American action films.
The script waivers in delivering movie monster action to spell out everything that's happening in the plot- the monster is wasted after all the buildup. A whole demonic possession subplot doesn't really go anywhere either. As the film is concerned about metaphor of cursed land it's ambiguous if by pulling the symbolic injury from the tiger (Korea's) paw that the film's characters- and the country can start healing itself. Otherwise the pain of feeling that Korea is a broken family lingers. I have some nostalgic interest for Cho Min-Sik because of his other films so by the end of the film the director makes an overt message to the audience to have this feeling of becoming family with the characters and their shared trauma.
The film just has a rhythm problem- sometimes wanting to be a family drama while other times slightly scary. It seems to pull a lot from The Wailing's ability to create atmosphere around recreated rituals and folklore. I just wish some of the extraneous logic for how they get there made more sense in the context of having intelligent characters are as at times it feels like they're almost inept charlatans (especially when one character starts counting up all the riches he'd get from other people in the team dying). The story pacing still felt like it was both too long for where it was going to go- and too short on how it concluded the first part of the film - leaving some threads hanging (especially regarding the family in America and the continued business).
A series of episodes could have captured the breadth of the story a little better. My favorite parts are in all the moments of the atmosphere and interesting lore that is presented logically and utilized to combat the evil forces- mostly because it shows a different mysterious system than the rites than Americans are used to from Catholic focused horror. Tightening the scenes to flow better and have more focus would have helped the film be more profound in uncovering the central mystery and create more genuinely horrific moments.