Exhuma

Exhuma

Jang Jae-hyun

4.5/5

Suspense, supernatural, mystery, Korean culture, history, geopolitics, WWII, horror

An intense and visceral movie about a team of afterlife specialists — two shamans, a geomancer (feng shui specialist) and a mortician — exhuming a cursed grave with a plot that goes all the way back to World War II, and addressing the legacy of wartime horrors wrecked onto the Korean peninsula and its people since.

This movie is extremely well-paced, without meandering dialogues or over-exposed emotions disturbing the unfolding mystery — from a generational curse in a wealthy Americanized Korean family to a vertically buried coffin, to a historical plot during the Japanese occupation, where the imperialist's shamans cursed the Korean land with a "nail" to break the country into two.

The horror in this movie comes not from jump scares, but from the cinematography of contrasted, atmospheric discomfort, as well as the capacity for evil found within human hearts — that it wasn't just the invading imperialists to blame, but also the traitors who aided them by betraying their own country and brethren.

And yet the awfulness from all that never quite persists, for the movie believes just as strongly in goodness and excising evil. The team cares genuinely for each other, and each possesses the nobility to do something greater than, and at the risk of their own lives. Through shoveling dirt, through pig and horse blood, through possession and hysteria, hope is also waiting to be unearthed.

This is a poignant and contemporary film with a very clear message from beginning all the way to the end.