Exhuma — Between the Sacred and the Supernaturally Rotten

Exhuma: full review

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Some horror films are happy to open a door and let a ghost out. Exhuma (Pamyo, 2024) opens a grave and, beneath the grave, finds an entire country. Jang Jae-hyun, who had already proven with The Priests (2015) and Svaha: The Sixth Finger (2019) that Korean exorcism cinema could be more than a catalog of contortions, delivers his most ambitious work here: an occult thriller that starts as a job for hired shamans and ends up as a séance on colonial memory. Eleven million viewers in South Korea rarely agree on something this uncomfortable.

The premise has a funereal simplicity. A wealthy family based in Los Angeles hires the young shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her apprentice Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) because their newborn firstborn cries inconsolably and the father suffers strange episodes. The diagnosis: the grandfather’s grave is badly placed and his spirit can’t rest. To move it they need the country’s most respected geomancer, Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik), and the undertaker Yeong-geun (Yoo Hai-jin). Sang-deok inspects the site and sums it up with the bluntness of an old appraiser: the place is so bad he doesn’t even want to touch it.

Direction and mise-en-scène: the ritual as a long take

Jang Jae-hyun shoots the rituals as if they were heists. The great exhumation sequence, in which Hwa-rim performs the daesalgut while the gravediggers dig to the rhythm of her drums, is a marvel of parallel editing: knives, sacrificed pigs, wet earth and a rain that seems to have been summoned by the ritual itself. Lee Mo-gae’s cinematography goes for an earthy, almost documentary realism that makes the supernatural more believable precisely because it is never embellished.

The director understands something many horror filmmakers forget: fear needs procedures. Exhuma takes time to show how these professionals of the beyond work, with their fees, their trade superstitions and their arguments about budget, and that texture of craft turns every apparition into a breakdown inside a machine the viewer already knows.

Performances: the underworld quartet

Choi Min-sik, the eternal Oh Dae-su of Oldboy, finds in Sang-deok one of his best recent roles: a man who has spent his life reading the earth for money and who, for the first time, faces something that can’t be appraised. His tired, stubborn performance is the film’s moral anchor. But the applause goes to Kim Go-eun: her shaman, in a tracksuit, with tattoos and an authority that never needs to raise its voice, performs the trances with impressive physical commitment. Yoo Hai-jin provides just the right comic relief, and Lee Do-hyun rounds out a quartet whose chemistry holds up even the more talky stretches.

Script: beneath the coffin, history

The film is split into two halves that work almost like two episodes. The first is a family ghost story, with a dead patriarch returning to collect outstanding debts. The second, best not revealed, literally digs deeper and turns horror into allegory: what lies buried beneath the grave has to do with the Japanese occupation of Korea and with a widespread legend in the country about the wounds the colonizers left driven into its land.

Therein lie both the greatness and the limit of Exhuma. The greatness, because few genre films dare to turn a historical trauma into a monster without losing their entertainment pulse. The limit, because the second half, more spectacular and more explanatory, sacrifices some of the mystery of the first and stretches the running time to some 134 minutes that you feel. There are scenes where the characters stop to explain the mythology with the thoroughness of a tour guide.

The best

• Kim Go-eun: A shaman who is both rock star and skilled worker. Her trances are among the most memorable moments in recent horror.
• The exhumation sequence: Editing, sound and ritual in perfect sync. A lesson in building tension without a single cheap scare.
• The thematic ambition: Turning colonial memory into a creature without the film becoming a pamphlet.

The worst

• The second half: Louder and more explained than the first; mystery is replaced by mythology in slides.
• The running time: About twenty minutes too long, especially in the final stretch.

The Claqueta Ácida Verdict (8/10)

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