acid reflects

How about some pre-Holy Week katatakutan that delivers not just the creeps but full-on stressful moments?

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much before the press screening, but the trailer looked good, and the movie stars one of my all-time favorite Korean actors, Kim Go-eun. No contest. Go Exhuma!

Exhuma (Korean title: 파묘, “digging”) is a nail-biting supernatural thriller from writer-director Jang Jae-hyun.

NOT SPOILERISH (I think)

A rich Korean family in Los Angeles offers a large sum of money to shaman duo Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) to save a young baby. However, the process would involve moving (exhuming) the tomb of an ancestor long gone. Hwa-rim enlists the expertise of veteran geomancer Sang-deok (Choi Min-shik) and mortician Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin.)

In this case of Murphy’s Law goes to the Korean boondocks, everything turns from bad to worse as soon as they dig up that grave.

Now we’ve all seen some Korean shamanism and occult rituals in films and shows before (Great Shaman Ga Doo Shim, The Guest, The Cursed, Bring It On Ghost, The 8th Night.) Often, the more serious of these stories would mix shamanism with some police detective procedural which would be the core of the show. But Exhuma puts these rituals to their believable realism in the center of the story, and the main actors all play their parts excellently, such that these ceremonies tell a story of their own. Never before have South Korean shaman rituals been presented so satisfyingly suspenseful – with the possible exception of 2016’s The Wailing (곡성 Gokseong, by Na Hong-jin), and even then, the rituals didn’t take a big portion of the film. Here in Exhuma, you get creeped out, intrigued, mesmerized and anxious all at once while watching close to actual shaman rituals. But the point is, you’d want (to believe) these rituals would work, because that’s how the bad guy can be dealt with in the story. We want that “expelliarmus!” to be as powerful, effective and believable as if Dr. Strange himself cast it.

What worked: spell-binding acting (regardless of my bias, they’re all good!), top-notch atmospherics and a confident control of tension that does not resort to cheap jumpscares for the heck of it. Also, the back story about Japanese occupation in World War II added some real drama to this fantasy.

What didn’t work (too much) is the final chapter which had to bind together the different strings of the story, but it was fun to have an anime moment when the protagonists banded together to fight the evil. With the surprise (oops?) appearance of another K-drama favorite, Kim Sun-young as Hwa-rim’s senior, Gwang-shim. It’s okay, it’s horror – a messy final act isn’t a deal-breaker.

#Exhuma opens this March 20th in cinemas across the Philippines. Presented by Columbia Pictures Philippines @ColumbiaPicPh

#ExhumaMoviePh