Exhuma: South Korean Ghost Story Out-Conjures The Conjuring
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B+
I am not so well versed in Korean culture or its history to catch all the nuances dropped into director Jang Jae-hyun’s supernatural thriller Exhuma. Still, the historical and cultural aspects are there, fleshing out a tale of hauntings and possessions.
Plenty happens in Exhuma, which branches out from its home base in South Korea, briefly touching down in America, with added references to Japan. It can make for a crowded narrative, launching several storylines of unsettled spirits and ghostly miscreants.
Choi Min-sik and Yoo Hae-jin examine a burial site key to the mystery of a wayward spirit
Yet Hyun's story is told efficiently enough not to seem convoluted or aimless. It helps that Exhuma is divided into six containable chapters, each with identifying titles appropriate to the action.
Jae-Hyun, who also wrote the screenplay, creates an epic horror film (Exhuma is a healthy 134 minutes long) involving a pair of young shamans, a mortician, and a veteran geomancer who team up to confront the wrath of an evil spirit who’s been released from a sealed coffin in a spectacular display of pyrotechnics, as though it were a flaming djinni escaping its lamp.
Jae-Hyun starts the story with a cool attitudinal panache that can only belong to the hip and the beautiful. In this case, they are the coolest couple in the occult business, shamans Hwarim (Kim Go-eun) and Bong Gil (Lee Do-hyun).
Hwarim and Bong Gil easily out-cool Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, who play the husband-and-wife team of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren from The Conjuring franchise. But because Exhuma doesn’t pretend to be based on anything factual, it outshines The Conjuring at every turn.
Hwarim is the tell-it-as-it-is person of the duo, while Bong Gil sits back, displaying his sleeve of tattoos, quietly observing their prospective clients' requests and responses. The film begins in the home of a wealthy Korean/American family who enlists the duo to intercept a deceased relative from tormenting the family’s baby boy—the cutest little tyke ever to be put on camera. From there, Hyun takes the story back to South Korea, where geomancer and feng-shui advisor Kim Sang Deok (Choi Min-sik) is exhuming the coffin containing the disgruntled body of an older woman whose appreciation of the afterlife is marred by some unknown earthly infraction.
The tale takes a dangerous turn when the newly formed team of Hwarim, Bong Gil, Kim Sang Deok, and Ko Young Geun (Yoo Hae-jin) take on a case that sends shivers of caution down Deok’s spine. Pressured by the client, who offers an uncommonly large swath of cash, Deok and the team ignore every instinct telling them to leave the job. They grow even more wary when the client begs them not to open the unburied coffin. Their commitment to fulfilling their contract will either make them rich or cost them their lives.
Exhuma seems like a promising idea for a streaming series. It works as a cinematic one-off, but it’s easy to imagine regularly tuning in to watch this team of top-notch paranormal experts combat otherworldly entities, some misguided, some downright evil.
But I come from an era when popular films were routinely converted into weekly series. Despite what those who are hearing about it here for the first time might think, Exhuma is a widely popular film in South Korea and beyond. It is easy to see how Exhuma attracted a significant and appreciative audience. Hyun’s use of humour (sparse but effective), political savvy, history, and horror builds upon an arc as fanciful as it is artful.
Exhuma is directed by Jang Jae-hyun and stars Choi Min-Sik, Lee Do-Hyun, Kim Go-Eun and Yoo Hae-jin. Exhuma is currently streaming on Shudder and various other platforms.