Exhuma (2024)

This Korean film plays out very much like a ghost story with all sorts of supernatural and religious mumbo-jumbo along the way. It's kind of a film of two halves really, with the first being a classic haunted-ancestor ghost story type thing and the second an occult-ish historical commentary about Korea's national trauma during Japanese rule between 1910 and 1945 (which covered the entire Korean Peninsula, not just the South).

A wealthy Korean-American family who lives in LA is haunted by a mysterious affliction affecting their newborn baby and eldest male heirs. They hire two young shamans, Hwa-rim and Bong-gil, who diagnose the problem as a "Grave's Calling"—the restless spirit of the family's wealthy grandfather in Korea calling out to his bloodline. (Told you!)

Hwa-rim partners up with Sang-deok (an expert geomancer/feng shui master) and Yeong-geun (a veteran funeral director). When Sang-deok inspects the grandfather's grave—located on an ominous, unmarked hill near the North Korean border—he senses extreme negative energy and initially refuses the job. However, the family agrees to cough up a shed-load of cash and they decide to perform a ritual (Daesal-gut) to safely exhume the coffin and cremate it without opening it. (Hope you're keeping up!)

While digging, a worker accidentally kills a snake with a human face (Nure-onna) buried near the grave, disturbing the site's spiritual balance. Due to bad weather (which suspiciously arrived just as the snake was killed), the coffin is temporarily moved to a local morgue instead of being immediately cremated (because if they do it in the rain, the person has a 'bad' afterlife, or something)! However, a greedy morgue worker unlocks the coffin looking for treasure (which local legend says might be in there), allowing the grandfather's vengeful spirit to escape. (At this point I was only hanging in to look at the pretty Kim Go-eun (Love in the Big City)!)

Anyway—back to the spirit, who goes on a killing spree, slaughtering his descendants across Korea and LA. Before cremation, Sang-deok learns that the grandfather was an infamous pro-Japanese collaborator (Chinilpa) who betrayed Korea for wealth. He was buried at this specific spot on the advice of a mysterious Japanese monk named Gisune. (At this point I was wondering if even she could keep me locked in!)

After cremating the grandfather's body, Sang-deok returns to the burial mound to 'apologise to the land'(!) and discovers a second, massive coffin buried vertically directly beneath the grandfather's grave. This is where things pick up a bit and the mystery becomes a bit intriguing—so I was back in! The team brings this whacking great big heavy second coffin (which was almost falling apart but held together by barbed wire) to a nearby Buddhist temple. That night, an eight-foot-tall monstrous samurai demon—an Oni—bursts out of the coffin. (Yay!) It kills the temple worker, severely injures Bong-gil by impaling him and summons a floating ball of fire (Onibi) before returning to its grave.

Bong-gil is hospitalised, his body possessed by the spirit, while Hwa-rim realises this entity is vastly more dangerous than any ghost: it is a physical manifestation of a Japanese warlord fused with a cursed sword. Sang-deok realises the entire setup was a trap. During the Japanese occupation, Japanese occultists (led by the monk Gisune) drove iron stakes into strategic points along the Korean peninsula to sever its "spiritual spine" (a geomantic belief known as Baekdudaegan, where Korea is shaped like a roaring tiger and its waist was staked to paralyse the country). (I'm beginning to lose it again!)

And on it goes. You really have to pay attention if you want to keep up with this, especially if you can't get a dubbed version and have to read subtitles! All sorts of scares and jiggery-pokery ensue as the cast leaps about from the burial plot to the temple, cook up decoys, find fish to appease the ghost, head back to the hospital multiple times (with ruthless editing of the narrative, incidentally), being attacked, having organs removed, bodies possessed, throwing up black stuff, drowning the nasty creatures in horse's blood (no, really), setting fire to stuff and leaping from one perilous adventure-point to another, trying to stay alive—so they can make it to a wedding in the final scene! It's completely bonkers on so many levels!

So as usual with these adventures, it's a question of who will survive, if anyone, and who gets their body parts lopped off instead! Or ripped off by the 8ft giant Japanese ghost! I don't mean to make light of it if it's about a nation's relationship with an abusive history, but it is horribly complex and hard to keep up with, making one seek out the humour in it. It's brilliantly acted by the cast, I will say that, especially the main four leads, imaginatively shot as a horror/thriller, and certainly once I'd got past the halfway mark of the 2 hours 14 minutes, it was quite a thrill-ride, even if I wasn't ever 100% sure what was going on!

The film is one part spine-chilling folklore, one part historical exorcism and three parts complete narrative chaos. It might leave your head spinning—and send you straight to Wikipedia or YouTube to figure out what on earth you just watched—but thanks to magnetic performances from Kim Go-eun and Choi Min-sik, superb atmospheric cinematography, and sheer unadulterated madness, it remains a wildly entertaining ride. Just leave your brain at the door and keep up with the subtitles!