The tale of young Bae Su-mi, played by Im Soo-jung who has spent time in a psychiatric facility after some event. She is questioned by a doctor and ultimately release to her family where she rejoins her sister Bae Su-yoen, father, and step mother; played by Moo Geun-young, Kim kap-soo, and Yum Jung-ah. The girls are greeted by their icy and uncomfortably cheerful step mother who is constantly been forced to take medication. Their father sees to always be distracted and distressed. Su-mi feels the need to protect her younger sister from not only their step mother but a haunting presence in the house. After Su-yoen sees a monster like creature in her room, she runs to safety in Su-mi’s care. But Su-mi is also visited by the grostes creature resembling their belated mother who climbs over Su-mi and allows blood to run down its legs.
When the apparition disappears it is discovered the three women in the house have all gotten their periods. After some time awake the girls stumble upon some pictures of their father, dead mother, and their step mother who was at the time the nurse for their sick mom. Realizing the affair that took lave, the girls take the pictures to hide. Su-mi falls asleep while stepmother Eun-joo yells at Su-yoen and lockers her in the wardrobe in her room. Su-mi wakes and vows to protect her sister from their wicked stepmother. That evening the family is visited by their step mother’s brother and sister in law. Eun-joo is frighteningly happy, laughing over very uncomfortable stories. Her brother and wife sit in silence not responding to Eun-joo’s trip down memory lane when suddenly her sister-in-law suffers a seizure. One the drive away from the Bae home, the sister in law reveals that she saw a creepy figure under the kitchen sink. Eun-joo checks the cupboards for anything when a disfigured arm reaches out onto her arm.
Eun-joo discovers all her pet birds are dead and is seen dragging a bloodied sack down the hall, Su-mi is sure Su-yeon’s body is in there. She fights Eun-yoen off but i defeated. Her stepmother is going to crush her head with a statue but misses, when Su-mi comes to her father is there sad and disappointed. He reveals he’s been there the whole time and the only other person in the house was herself. All the things she had watch her stepmother doing was actually herself, and that her sister was dead. The trauma of her death lead her to be hospitalized the first time. The bloodied bag that she thought Eun-joo had was her’s filled with dolls. Su-mi is taken back to the hospital, where Eun-joo tries to comfort her. Through a series of flashback the audience can see how Eun-joo was their mother’s nurse. Their mother had hung herself in the wardrobe, Su-yoen discovers her mother’s body in the wardrobe in her room and tries to save her, the furniture falls on her slowly crushing her. Eun-joo walks in and sees what’s unfolding in Su-yeon’s room and walks out as if to pretend she didn’t see what was going on. Unaware Su-mi gives her step mom attitude and leaves the house, never catching her dying sister’s plea for help.
The Uninvited is an American adaptation of the K. horror film, a tale of two sisters. The film follows closely by starting out with Anna, played by Emily Browning, the films main character in a psychiatric hospital following her suicide attempt. Anna is cooperative with her doctor and does her best to make her way back to her normal life. Before she is able to leave the hospital she is bothered by patient in the hospital who tends to be talkative and who’s room is across the hall from Anna’s room. She’s picked up by her father, played by David Strathairn, who take Anna home to their lake front home. There she is greeted by her sister Alex, played by Arielle Kebbel, and dad’s new girlfriend Rachel, played by Elizabeth Banks. Knowing that Rachel was their mother’s live in nurse, the two sisters despise Rachel and suspect she was the reason their mom was dead. Her sister ends up confront their dad for sleeping with Rachel while their mom was still alive and bedridden and Anna tells Alex how her bizarre dreams are happening when she wakes up, ultimately this must mean that what the suspected was most likely true.
Anna meets up with her boyfriend at the docks who tells her he has something important to tell her about her mother’s death, but they are interupted so he they plan to meet up later that night. When Anna’s boyfriend fails to meet up at the agreed upon time, she’s surprised to have him climb through her window, they start to kiss when his back starts to deform and break in front of her for no reason. Scared, Anna runs out of the room and discovers him to be gone when she enters the room again. The next morning he’s found dead in the lake with his back broken. The sisters are convinced this is Rachel’s doing and that she needed to be stopped. So they start looking for her nursing credentials and fail to find any but they do find that some years back there was a nurse who became obsessed with the husband of the wife she was caring for, killing off his entire family to be with him. The nurse was Mildred Kemp and Anna had been having hallucinations of the children that were murdered.This convinces Anna and Alex that Rachel is actually Mildred and that their whole family is in danger.
Anna goes to the police at no avail, Rachel ended up picking up a distressed Anna and sedating her to get her back home. Rachel brings Anna to bed and changes her clothing. Unable to move she see’s ALex in the doorway with a knife ready to ensure her sister, before Anna ends up passing out. She she wakes she searches for Alex and discovers Rachel’s body in their dumpster. Alex is covered in blood holding the large knife. Asking what Alex did, Anna takes her sister’s hand as their dad returns home from work. He asks what Anna has done, and she tells her dad Alex killed Rachel out of fear for their lives. But her father tells her Alex is dead, she died in a fire that had taken her mother’s life as well. Anna starts to flash back to the night of their death, she had caught her dad cheating with Rachel and went to burn the house down when a gas leak was ignited by a fallen candle, Anna was the cause of her sister and mother’s death. Anna had met up her her that night with her boyfriend and let him fall and break his back. Anna murdered Rachel who was kind and not at all the evil women she was perceived to be. Anna ends up being arrested and sent back to the psychiatric hospital, when she arrives she’s cheerful and content, she looks out at across the fall to read her across the hall neighbor’s door name; Mildred Kemp.
Film Analysis
Plot Changes
- Vocal dead sister
- Sister and mother’s death is directly main character’s fault
- Love intrest
- Psychiatric patient who killed her lover’s family
- Interaction with police
- Mother is physically ill before death, doesn’t commit suicide
- Affair directly sets off chain of events
- Step mother is murdered
- Dad is a writer writing about his two daughters
The films directors made the American remakes of the The Ring and The Grudge, films that had been huge box office hits, the storylines were altered to fit American audiences, but this film hit the mark. In the film review posted online by hobbyist film critics We Are Movie Geeks explain how the acting and cinematography were perfectly fine, the the overall story was faulty to say the least. The Guard Brother’s choice to place Anna at fault for her mother’s death felt like every predictable want from an American audience. Overall the goal to give the audience what they wanted a beautiful monster who accidentally kills her mother and sister and breaks down and kills her step mother to deal with her own guilt. It pulls the audience away from the fundamental idea’s that made A Tale of Two Sister’s so uncomfortable; so skin crawling keep your eyes wide open terrifying. This could be in the lack of resolution in the film as pointed out by AVClub. It is only clear that the monster in both films is there to warn the protagonist that there was more to their mother’s death. In The Uninvited the fear of the monster goes away when in the final scene the mentally unwell patient is reviewed to be the childrens killer. Though my own wonderings have surfaced in the comparison of the films, it would seem that American audiences would sympathise cold blooded murder with mental illness. In the original film, Su-yoen never kills anyone. Even her bloodied bag is revealed to just be a bag full of dolls. It would seem that the American audience is more scared of committing a murder because of a mental break down. In turn this could be due to the lack of awareness when it comes to mental illnesses and psychotic break downs.
A look into the differences in the way each film portrays it’s doctors can give a better insight into this theory. In the original film, the doctor is clinical, calm and has attempted to do his job but understands that Su-Yoen is too ill to be helped at the time. Her unwillingness to talk and ultimately deal with her trauma causes her to stay in a state of psychosis. This could be the first tale tale sign that much of what is happening in the film is due to her illusion, though it doesn’t explain the dead like monster casting warnings her way. While in the American remake Anna’s time spent with the Anna’s time in treatment is pleasant and she looks cooperative and ready to join the outside world once again. This could be seen as a failing of psychiatry entirely. There is the implication that there is no cure for the mentally ill, they will act out of their disillusion if mixed in with the outside world. It might mirror the American view on mental health and psychosis. There seems to be a disconnect for audience, the murder is the ultimate price of mental illness, instead of a mind that can not connect with reality or with those around it.
Furturemore, mental illness is created by two different kinds of trauma in the films. The first was the death of Su-mi and the mother’s suicide. It was guilt shock that drove Su-yeon to her break down, guilt for not being there to save her mother and sister. On the other hand, in The Uninvited Anna’s guilt was directly caused by her own actions. She intended to set her father’s home on fire where he was in bed with Rachel. Anna’s actions were to seriously harm her adulterous father and his mistress, maybe even to kill them. The murder Rachel was not an effect of the psychosis but something Anna has wanted to do from the beginning. In the original film Eun-yeon took medication and was the cause for Su-yoen’s pain, she blamed her for being abusive towards her sister and intolerable. In the flashback for the audience Eun-yeon sees Su-mi dying and does nothing. The audience has a reason to spite her and hope the monster does come for her in the end of the movie. While Rachel was murdered for falling in love with a man who was still married but marriage was ultimately over. At the end of The Uninvited, audiences regret the disdain felt towards Rachel; afterall she just wanted to gain Anna’s acceptance.
But the greatest contrast in the way audiences viewed the main characters confliction was through the personification of the monsters. Initially the monster was Su-yeon’s mother with a scary distortion but in the second film the monster was the psych patient’s murdered children. Su-yeon’s monster was directly related to the trauma she had experienced. Her monster was her dead mother, her monster warned her of how her death became. In contrast Anna’s monster was the child of a different killing, tying Anna’s psychosis with the psychotic behavior of a fellow murderer. Ultimately tying both murderous behaviours under the rug and reclaiming them as mentally ill patients who couldn’t be held responsible for their actions.
Asian Horror Flicks 