Grave Digger
Korea’s premier director of religious thrillers – okay its only director of religious thrillers – tops himself.
Exhuma
Director: Jang Jae-hyun • Writer: Jang Jae-hyun
Starring: Choi Min-sik, Kim Go-eun, Yoo Hae-jin, Lee Do-hyun, Kim Jae-cheol, Kim Min-jin, Kim Sun-young
South Korea • 2hrs 14mins
Opens Hong Kong April 11 • IIB
Grade: B
You kind of have to respect writer-director Jang Jae-hyun’s unflinching devotion to his brand. He’s only made three films since 2015: his debut The Priests, about a priest and a young deacon exorcising a woman who becomes possessed after a car wreck; Svaha: The Sixth Finger, his sophomore film, teamed a pastor with a cop investigating a murderous religious cult; and now Exhuma | 파묘 puts a geomancer, two shamans and an undertaker together to save a possessed infant. All three films weave together Catholicism, Buddhism, shamanism, past lives and the power of faith and their influence on the present. Like I said, Jang is committed to his brand and no one else is really mixing supernatural horror with religion quite like him. Nothing’s quite as straightforward as The Exorcist.
Exhuma is the biggest hit of the year so far at home in Korea, and it’s easily Jang’s best film; the natural culmination of his oeuvre so far – even if that’s not a terribly high bar to clear. Singular though Jang may be, The Priests was messy and rough around the edges narratively speaking, and Svaha was slow AF coming out of the gate. The fact that Exhuma starts and ends strong, and takes a creative dive into national collective trauma serves it well when the pacing goes awry and the pictures go pitch black. Getting Choi Min-sik (Oldboy, I Saw the Devil) to star also helps. A lot.
Exhuma’s plot is too much for this page, and works best the less you know anyway, but here’s the short version. Geomancer Kim Sang-deok (Choi), a kind of feng shui master who finds increasingly rare premium grave sites for the wealthy, gets involved in a scheme to cleanse a grave with a pair of occasional colleagues, shamans Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun in his first film). Their client is a rich dude in LA whose newborn son – a first born – is in the infant ICU, a target of an ancestral haunting. Credit to Jang for making the whole spirits and rituals and talismans angle a casually accepted one that jettisons the need for sceptics and the resulting debate over the need for a shaman. It also nips an even fatter run time in the bud, so bonus.
Exhuma peaks early, with Hwa-rim’s exhumation ritual (a truly fantastic sequence), performed after the motley crew – the fourth is Sang-deok’s undertaker pal Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin, Confidential Assignment 2: International) – realises the baby’s great-great-grandfather is interred in a sinister grave up near the border with North Korea. This great-great-grandfather has a murderous secret that dates back to Japan’s occupation of Korea and beyond. Again… the short version.
Digging up the past, literally, and unearthing (sorry, can’t help it) family and national traumas are tied to a mythology that Jang peels back layer by layer, slowly and methodically with bursts of solid gore dropped in every so often. One of Jang’s more clever ploys is throwing down Hwa-rim’s ritual in Act I, the kind of dramatic scene that traditionally signals resolution. The minor misdirect puts us in a headspace to expect more, and mostly ready for the revelations to come. Those revelations go down easily thanks to Choi and Kim doing the heavy lifting. Both commit to their roles entirely, playing it straight and giving Jang’s more convoluted bits the kind of veracity fantastical material like Exhuma needs.
The stretch run swerves into traditional horror (ghosts, creatures, fireballs), even though Jang and DOP Lee Mo-gae favour so much darkness it’s hard to be too, too scared. Guys, striking a visibility balance is crucial. But, and this is a big but, Jang’s Korea-specific spin on possession, ancient souls and the sins of the past give Exhuma a mostly fresh sheen on an old genre. Mostly. — DEK