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The two sisters in this glossy gothic creep-out from South Korea are teenage girls who, some time after the death of their mother, return home from an institution to find that in addition to a neurotic stepmother, they have to contend with an assortment of real and imagined memories, terrifying dreams, weird apparitions, and violent persecutions. As the girls, their father, and their stepmother rotate around one another in their rambling house, it becomes apparent that who is terrorizing whom is open to question. To tell this cruel and ambiguous story, director Kim Ji-woon adopts a frigid mise-en-scène and chooses a pace deliberate enough to allow him to revel in the different nuances of dissonance, suspense, and surprise created by the ominous details and messy jolts the script throws in his path. The narrative keeps threatening to bog down in perplexities, but Kim does an adroit job of handling the multiple ambiguities of point of view, and even at its most maddening and cute, the elaborate interplay between hallucination and reality rewards attention. In Korean with English subtitles. (115 minutes)
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
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