When they discover a rich man's infant son is cursed and haunted by the spirit of one of his ancestors, two shamen (Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun) enlist the help of two geomancers (the great Choi min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin) to try to exhume said ancestor and pacify him. Things... do not go smoothly; Thanks to one doomed idiot and to a further secret buried under the ancestor's grave, things go pretty much the opposite of smoothly.
Exhuma is an excellent, handsomely produced horror movie (and the top-grossing movie of 2024 in its native South Korea).
It's composed of two very different halves; In the first, quieter part, the four paranormal experts carefully grapple with the menace posed by the interred body, and try to unravel why it's become a nasty occult minefield. The second part gets surprisingly over the top as several spirits (several of them based on Japanese Yokai) come out to play, and a couple of them go ballistic on the rich man, his family, some locals, and a whole lot of pigs.
Just about everything in the film works beautifully. The acting is excellent, and writer/director Jang Jae-hyun keeps an impeccable atmosphere and a beautiful autumnal palette (cinematography: Lee Mo-gae). It's not hugely bloody (most of the gore in the film belongs to farm animals), but there are some pretty cool, very tasteful special effects later on. No matter how strange things get the film, while never dour, maintains a carefully controlled, serious tone throughout.
The mystery is slightly perplexing, coming at it from a western perspective, but it's relatively easy to parse - and I love that at its core it is indeed a geomantic puzzle. Plus, it keeps things fresh: I'd love it if more western curse/possession movies had floating fireballs, a small tribute to Kwaidan, coffins wrapped in prayers and barbed wire, and tiny human-headed snakes.
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