(Pamyo)
South Korea. 2024.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Jae-hyun Jang, Producers – Kim Young-min, Kwong Ji Jong & Park Hyeong-jin, Photography – Lee Mo-Gae, Music – Kim Tae-seong. Production Company – Showbox/Pinetown/MCMC.
Cast
Min-sik Choi (Kim Sang-deok), Kim Go-eun (Lee Hwa-rim), Yoo Hae-jin (Ko Yeong-geun), Lee Do-hyun (Yoon Bong-gil), Kim Jae-cheol (Park Ji-yong), Kim Sun-young (Oh Gwang-shim), Kim Ji-an (Park Ja-hye), Jeon Jin-Ki (Park Geun-Hyeon), Park Juna-ja (Aunt), Kim Tae-Joon (Chang-Min)
Plot
The shaman Lee Hwa-rim is hired by the wealthy Park family in Los Angeles to exorcise a spirit that threatens to possess their infant grandchild. She determines that it is affected by Grave’s Call, the spirit of an ancestor. The family head Park Ji-yong asks her to relocate and cremate the coffin of the ancestor. To do so, Hwa-rim calls upon the help of the geomancer Kim Sang-deok, who specialises in locating burial sites that have good feng shui for clients. They find the grave near the North Korean border but Kim walks away because it is a very bad feng shui location and the ritual will have negative effects on them. Hwa-rim persuades him to return and for her to conduct an exorcism ritual as the coffin is unearthed. This is done but a local then breaks open the coffin that evening, believing there is a treasure inside. The ancestor’s spirit is released and goes on to possess and kill members of the Park family. Kim returns to the gravesite and finds another coffin is buried vertically beneath the one they unearthed – that of a Japanese samurai. That evening the samurai comes to life and begins to kill and there is a desperate race to find a means to despatch it.
Exhuma was the third feature film from South Korean director Jae-hyun Jang. Jang first appeared with The Priests (2015), a Korean possession and exorcism film, followed by Svaha: The Sixth Finger (2019) about a cult investigator. He has also co-written House of the Disappeared (2017) about a mysterious house.
I have written elsewhere – see my essay on Possession Films – how the Hollywood version of the Possession and Exorcism film has become tediously caught up in parroting moves laid down fifty years ago by The Exorcist (1973) that seems to vary very little or even consider any other religion every time someone churns out another entry in the genre. Even Jae-hyun Jang’s previous film The Priests is still caught up in these clichés.
Enter the South Korean film. A couple of years earlier, we had the wildly imaginative The 8th Night (2021) set around Buddhist rituals, while there had been the earlier Dr. Cheon and Lost Talisman (2023) about a shamanisic exorcist. Korean companies had also produced the Thai The Medium (2021), the film that most resembles this, following a folk shaman. Now there is Exhuma, a film that comes rooted within Confucian shamanistic ritual. Now Exhuma is not a standard Possession and Exorcism film – possession forms a minor element where one of the team Lee Do-hyun is controlled by the samurai later in the show and there is a battle to stop the baby being possessed, although there is quite a bit involving ritual exorcism of the graves and the spirits of the dead.
The filmmakers speak at length about how they consulted real Korean shamans for accuracy of the rituals so the clear impression we get is that what is seen up on screen is the real thing. And holy crap – things get pretty wild in Korean shamanism. We see how the ritual requires unclean spirits to be transferred into pig carcasses to be slashed during the course of the proceedings, while elsewhere fish are strewn on the ground to lure the samurai spirit and horse blood is used as part of the exorcism. There are a host of things about making rice circles, of how the exorcists must go in to confront the samurai with their faces painted with characters like something out of Kwaidan (1964). There is the whole ritual involving geomancy and the necessity of locating burial sites where the feng shui is good and how some sites can be deemed bad, or of how a rainy day can ruin the entire ritual because it confuses the spirits on their journey heavenwards. Or even the rather charming scenes where a group of women gather and lure the wounded Lee Do-hyun back to waking by laying out food and teasing him that they are having a feast and he is avoiding them.
Exhuma is very much dominated by the wealth of cultural and ritual detail that it has chosen to throw into the film – in much the same way that William Peter Blatty intended The Exorcist as an examination of the issue of faith just as much as a horror story. The actual horror elements often come as an afterthought to this. As the chief geomancer, Min-sik Choi – almost unrecognisable as the ultra-violent protagonist in the modern Korean classic Oldboy (2003) – radiates a wisely authority as Mr Kim. There also seems quite a bit that refers back to the Korean occupation of Japan during the early half of the 20th Century of which I am not conversant with the history to comment.
That said, Jae-hyun Jang does not neglect the horror side of things either. There is a fine scene where the client Kim Jae-cheol is in his hotel room and receives a cellphone call from Min-sik Choi urging him to stay in his room at the same time as there is a knock at the door insisting that it is Choi there, which the voice on the phone urges him to ignore this and open the window, before it starts laughing. The emergence of the giant hulking samurai from the coffin and during the climactic scenes, come to tear out livers and the fight to despatch it is also a well worthwhile piece.
Trailer here