It's a Long Process

 

I love South Korean horror films. I just wish every one wasn't always a good 20 minutes longer than it needs to be.

Quick Plot: Shamans Hwa-rim and Bong-gil are very good at their jobs, but when a wealthy family hires them to help their haunted baby, they need some backup. Hwa-rim calls in acclaimed geomancer Kim Sang-deok and his trusty mortician Yeong-geun to locate the family patriarch's grave and move the body to a consecrated location. 

With bad rain, the group decides to wait out the reburial in a nearby and nearly empty monastery. As they rest up after a wild ritual and satisfying noodle dinner, Yeong-geun's local contact decides to do some grave robbing. Naturally, a very angry, very large demon gets released in the process.

There's a lot more that happens in Exhuma, mostly because this movie is 150+ minutes long. I had been hearing good things about the film but couldn't quite fathom the day where I summoned that time block, so it felt mandatory to watch it when I ended up on a plane with a more robust selection of in-flight entertainment. I had nowhere to go.

I'll say about Exhuma what I said last year about Searching, but for very different reasons: this is indeed the perfect plane movie. Searching worked in that way because it was intended to feel like the POV of a laptop. For Exhuma, it's simply the best way to force yourself to sit down for nearly three hours and commit to one story.

This isn't to say Exhuma drags. It's more that it simply feels like too much movie. We shift so many times, from cool millenial shamans to Japanese colonial ghosts to suicidal hauntees and so much more. As three separate 45-minute films, Exhuma is deeply enjoyable. But when assembled together, it doesn't feel epic in scale...just very long. 

High Points

I love a mixed-generation genre film, and one of Exhuma's strengths is how the very cool and young Kim Go-eun and the retirement-ready Choi Min-sik play off each other. It's more complex than a father/daughter-ish dynamic, as they represent different eras and angles on how to manage the supernatural. To watch how they work together on it is genuinely fascinating

Low Points

For a movie this long (TWO AND A HALF FULL HOURS) it feels especially frustrating to leave the fate of a character up in the air. Our poor unlucky gravedigger who encounters the human-headed snake and comes down with a debilitating, I don't know, ghost sickness, is last seen struggling to breathe in a dank apartment. The fact that we never return to him or learn of his fate feels either lazy or kind of disrespectful, as if a working class character doesn't need resolution

Lessons Learned

Eerie days call for hot soup

A fox at a gravesite is an ominous sign

No high floor hotel should ever allow for human-sized windows

Rent/Bury/Buy

Exhuma is not a movie I'll go back to, but I'm glad I watched it. It's GOOD, not great, and if sprawling Korean ghost stories interest you, then I can't recommend it enough. But if you see that running time and wince, I can't argue that it justifies taking up that much of your time. Then again, if you happen to be flying cross-country, it's an easy way to keep you busy in between tiny bags of pretzels.