Okay, the story goes something like this: once upon a time, a few years back, there arrived a new wave of Japanese cinema - a horror cinema, dubbed J-horror. Being familiar with both the first and the second wave of Japanese film-making, with names like Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Suzuki, Imamura, Kobayashi, Teshigahara, and others, naturally one had justifiably great expectations for this reappearance of Japan on the silver screen. And the new wave DID pay off, at first. My eyes, and mind, were first blown open by Takashi Miike's sublime Audition, with its blend of cinematic reverie and gutwrenching, body-mutilating literality. Also, of course, Hideo Nakata's two Ringu films, with their postmodern remix of myth and technology, managed to turn a few heads, including mine. His Dark Water also delivered, big time. But then, what do you know, it solidified into a genre cinema, with all the attendant marketing and export values, and of course, banality and standardization followed. We have been treated to a series of films quoting chapter and verse from Ringu, including Takashi Miike's shockingly conventional and uninspired One Missed Call; Byeong-ki Ahn's utterly unoriginal Phone also looms large on this list. The Pang Brother's ridiculous The Eye could also be mentioned (I mean, HOW can you take a film seriously that takes it's denouement from the awful Richard Gere vehicle The Mothman Prophecies, the most pathetically un-scary horror film of all time? And I AM talking chapter and verse here). But, old darlings apparently die slow, and so, enter A Tale of Two Sisters. Hopes high after glowing reviews, me and a friend went to see it.
Let's just put it like this: we have vowed NEVER to see another J-horror movie, unless we have it from a very reliable source that it's actually worth the effort. This film isn't, in the extreme. Thematically, it reads as a Korean version of Amenabar's The Others, but where that film managed to stay composed and terse all the way through, and actually both frightened and surprised you in equal measure, this film is just unfocused and vague, filled with schlocky artful suspense that is supposed to keep you on the edge of your chair, but doesn't, really. It doesn't even manage to deliver as a horror film, doesn't have the energy to whip up a decent level of scare: the "terrifying" scenes are few and far apart (once again, Ringu chapter and verse: think Sadako coming out of the TV...). Unlike, say, the magnificent and mindbending Old Boy, where each turn in the complex narrative was accompanied by horrifying depictions of bodily mutilation and transformation, actually managing to create a sort of shadow world of corporeal insecurity, a bodily mirroring of the compositional pace of the film. That film was utterly spellbinding, as good cinema should be; this IS NOT. DON'T see it.
Let's just put it like this: we have vowed NEVER to see another J-horror movie, unless we have it from a very reliable source that it's actually worth the effort. This film isn't, in the extreme. Thematically, it reads as a Korean version of Amenabar's The Others, but where that film managed to stay composed and terse all the way through, and actually both frightened and surprised you in equal measure, this film is just unfocused and vague, filled with schlocky artful suspense that is supposed to keep you on the edge of your chair, but doesn't, really. It doesn't even manage to deliver as a horror film, doesn't have the energy to whip up a decent level of scare: the "terrifying" scenes are few and far apart (once again, Ringu chapter and verse: think Sadako coming out of the TV...). Unlike, say, the magnificent and mindbending Old Boy, where each turn in the complex narrative was accompanied by horrifying depictions of bodily mutilation and transformation, actually managing to create a sort of shadow world of corporeal insecurity, a bodily mirroring of the compositional pace of the film. That film was utterly spellbinding, as good cinema should be; this IS NOT. DON'T see it.
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