For reasons of journalistic ethics, I don't wanna yack on about the ending, suffice to say it manages to make a few pretty exhausted clichés seem rather fresh. It's like if someone was just a couple meters from the end of a race, and they fall over, but then someone runs up and kicks them so hard in the arse that they fly over the finish line even when everybody, including the runner in question, figured they were about to die in a puddle of their own Lucozade-scented puke.
Also, despite the confusion that sets in here and there, you never get the feeling that Jee-Won's just messing with you since it's cool nowadays to fuck with the narrative. It's not like he's flinging twists and turns into the mix to hide the fact that there's not much of the "substance". And even though, at the end, it's still pretty unresolved, you watch a few times and holy shit, man, I see what the hell's going on here. Some bits seem so simple you don't bother thinking about them, presuming them to be cut-and-dried and so on, whatever a writerly term might be for "sorted". Think again, though, have another viewing, and maybe all those tied up bits start getting a bit unraveled. It's a hell of a lot of fun, is the truth of the matter.
What this boils down to, is that this shit is some unique and special shit, as opposed to regular old shit you can see any place. At times it's like a Burton-esque mesh of The Haunting and Spirit Of The Beehive, except instead of a young lass obsessed with James Whale's Frankenstein and annoying the hell out of her sister, it's a young lass obsessed with something or other that may or may not have to do with that closet that everyone's so worried about. Also, she doesn't annoy her sister, preferring to cuddle her, comfort her and so on. Much nicer breed of sister, all being told.
Jee-Won wants to yack at great length in interviews and such about how this is all about Traditional Family Values, and how the house has become something to be feared, as opposed to a place of comfort. There's some mileage in those rantings, but, like Takashi Miike's Visitor Q, he creates something haunting and beautiful where other folks might just have dashed together some half-arsed reactionary toss. The Miike thing is interesting, actually, since Jee-Won's debut, The Quiet Family, was later remade by the demented skinhead as The Happiness Of The Katakuris, although he did add some extra zombies and claymation.
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