There must be magic in Korea—and, according to the subject of today’s Monday Morning Movie Review, there might actually be—because the Korean film industry just keeps hitting homeruns.  Since the release of the Oscar-winning Parasite (2019) and the smash series Squid Game (2021), South Korean movies and television shows have been on the West’s radar.

Koreans seem to excel in the horror genre; indeed, I’d argue that both Parasite and Squid Game, while not precisely “horror” films, certainly have very strong horror and thriller elements.  They’re good, too, at putting messages into their art that feel both timely and organic, but never overtly preachy; Parasite and Squid Game both touched on issues of class, for example.

This week’s film, 2024’s Exhuma, is overtly a horror film, and also has a message embedded within it, as most horror does.  Instead of pointing out the disparities of class, however, Exhuma is a thoroughly nationalist film, in the way that East Asian nations embrace their national identities with a deep, ancestral reverence.

More importantly, it is an excellent—and scary!—film.

Exhuma opens with a wealthy Korean-American family struggling to placate their first-born male child.  The baby is crying perpetually, and only heavy sedatives can give the infant any relief.  A duo of Korean shamans, as well as an elderly geomancer and his mortician friend, team up to investigate the source of the baby’s affliction.

The answer is a generational curse, going back to the baby’s great-grandfather.  An exhumation of his remains must be made, followed by a cremation.  According to the geomancer, the burial plot is all wrong, and he nearly backs out of the whole project.  But the lucrative nature of the gig entices him to go through with it, and the young female shaman convinces him that she can distract any evil spirits while the exhumation proceeds.

Once the coffin is loaded up and ready for transport, one of the diggers notices a strange snake emerging from the grave.  He chops the head off the snake, and almost immediately the skies turn black and a heavy downpour begins.  The mortician and the geomancer realize that they cannot cremate the remains, because in Korean shamanic tradition, the soul of a body cremated on a rainy day will be “confused” and unable to find its way to Heaven.

As such, they convince their shady friend at the local city morgue to store the coffin until the weather clears. Unfortunately, their shady friend has heard rumors of this coffin, and believes there to be treasure hidden within its juniper walls (juniper, incidentally, was the wood used only for the coffins of royalty, or those highly honored in pre-modern Korea).

Well, you can guess what happens next.  The spirit of the grandfather begins to wreak havoc, until the team can manage a hasty cremation.

Have I given too much away?  Perhaps—but that’s only the first half of the story.  Really, it’s only maybe the first third.  Just when we think we’ve gotten a fairly straightforward setup for a ghost story, just in a more exotic locale, things get really interesting.

Within the grave plot of the vengeful grandfather there is another coffin—seven-feet in length, and buried vertically.  Instead of a vengeful spirit, this coffin contains an anima, the reanimated corpse and spirt of a centuries-old Japanese samurai.

Here is where the film’s nationalism—and Korea’s complex modern history—comes into play.  The Japanese conquered and colonized the Korean peninsula in 1910, and remained in the peninsula through the end of the Second World War.  The vengeful ancestor was a chinilpa, a collaborator with the Japanese occupation.  That association has created problems for the family both spiritually and materially (the family is very well-off, but lives largely in the United States, perhaps because of the grandfather’s association with the occupiers).

Further, the characters frequently note the ferocity of Japanese spirits, that they will stop at nothing to inflict harm and pain.  There is also a clear distinction between Japanese and Korean characters in the film.  In one early scene, the female shaman is addressed in Japanese on a plane, and she tersely informs the stewardess that, “by the way, I am Korean.”  I missed the significance of that early on, because I did not realize the stewardess had addressed the shaman in Japanese, but connected the dots later (as I watched the film, I became a bit better at distinguishing Japanese from Korean, though that’s probably because the reanimated samurai corpse spoke in an aggressive, guttural Japanese, clearly distinct from the softer Korean pronunciation).

There is a great deal of sleuthing and battling of Korean-style shamanism versus Japanese spiritualism.  It is clear that there is no love lost between these two cultures, and characters well into the twenty-first century are still haunted—literally and figuratively—by the Japanese occupation of Korea.

The story itself and the pacing are really good.  Yes, you have to read captions the entire time, but it helps with the immersion.  I tried watching the flick while playing Civilization VI, and I ended up watching in chunks in between turns of the game.  Exhuma definitely merits close, undistracted watching, though I think I caught most of the visual cues from the film.

Keep in mind, too, that the flick is about 135 minutes, so it’s a time investment.  But it is an investment that is worth your time.  I highly recommend Exhuma; it might be the best film I’ve seen this year.