That kinda nonsense rattles about in the skull until well after the credits, and then you watch it again a couple times on account of not only do you wanna figure this stuff out, but also, the flick is a motherfucking masterpiece.
What you can go ahead and get on with, if you feel like it of an afternoon, is adding A Tale Of Two Sisters to that rather short list of Fairy Tale Horror Movies, the likes of The Company Of Wolves or Bride Of Frankenstein or Willard, horror flicks that are just as enchanting and just as subversive as those tales about somebody or other gets thrown out their home and ends up in some forest mincing around with all sorts of otherworldly beasts.
There was that other one, too, Snow White - A Tale Of Terror, which snubbed the singing dwarves and talking deer of the Disney version for a much more Sigourney Weaver-based approach. It was alright.
To this end, in A Tale Of Two Sisters, we get the events taking place in a gorgeous, Gothic mini-mansion, the kinda place where television sets and phones and shit like that seem like horrific intrusions, digital remnants of the nowadays, amidst all the otherworldly tranquillity.
The flick is actually based on a Korean folk tale, Janghwa And Hongryun, so this all makes sense. In case you didn't know, folk tales differ from fairy tales in that fairy tales are stuff you read to your children, possibly involving giants, and a folk tale is something anthropological types like to study and maybe write a thesis on somewhere along the line. They include giants and shit also, but usually the giant is really a penis, or maybe "Mother".
I haven't read the source tale, so I don't know how faithful this all is. I doubt there was a psychiatric hospital in the original, to be honest. In those days you probably just tied someone to the farthest tree in the forest, and hoped they sobered up at some point, or maybe you burned them in the village square. If they happened to be hilarious types, like Jim Carrey in Me, Myself And Irene, then probably you would leave them in a tavern, so as they could entertain drinkers with all sorts of goofy bullshit.
A Tale Of Two Sisters is being marketed as a horror flick, and it is, but it's more of the growing-unease type deal than, say, the shit yourself rotten type epitomized by the Ju-On series. There's a bit with a freaky, jerky-limb woman as per usual, but it's pretty brief. This is more like The Others, in that it just wants to fling you into a Bad Motherfucking Place and then pinch you every so often, so as you're constantly on edge, thinking about "I don't like this place, and also, I keep getting pinched in the asshole."
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