3. Tale of Two Sisters
Another addition from the Korean canon comes in the form of this psuedo family drama that again turns expected narrative conventions on their head with a whopper of a twist up its sleeve that you will never see coming. Based on a well known Korean folktale, A Tale of Two Sisters introduces us to Su-Mi and Su-Yeon two young girls in the grip of a hysterically abusive step-mother- one shy and submissive, almost silent in her acceptance of circumstance, the other more out-spoken and protective. But what does their archetypical evil step-mother have to do with the phantoms they are visited by at night and the other strange occurrences around the house? Revealing its secret early on, the rest of the film plays out like a puzzle as we are left to consider the concept of sanity and the effects of grief. Asian cinema has given us some great examples of psychological horror, tales that play with the mind and confront us with emotionally unstable protagonists unable to decipher reality from fiction. A Tale of Two Sisters is by far the best example of this to date.