An unspeakable dread

There's nothing more inconceivably vile in the psychic world of the male director of horror films than a menstruating girl. Poor, eponymous Carrie (1976): her PMT was so savage that it transmogrified into homicidal telekinesis. While Linda Blair, in The Exorcist (1973), was obviously possessed by an opportunistic demon with a Lolita complex. As for Roman Polanski - well, say no more.

The notion that the diabolic pullulates particularly well in the fervid bodies of burgeoning young women runs - if you'll forgive the expression - like a river through Western, Judaeo- Christian culture. The Maleus Maleficorum or Hammer of the Witches, which was the handbook of the popular delusion that swept across medieval Europe, took particular glee in telling its readers how to spot the 666 in their sweet 16s.

But let's not be Eurocentric about this. As Kim Jee-Won's film amply demonstrates, there's a true universality to this notion. His is the fifth film to be based on the Korean folk tale Janghwa and Hongryun, and while it seems safe to assume that he has added his own hefty dollop of masculine anxiety in the face of female biology, the perfidy and hysteria of the protagonists must be present - if latent - in the original.

Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) and Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young), are the two teenage sisters of the title. The film opens with their return from a long spell in hospital. We know they have been mentally ill, but the precise cause of their malaise is obscure. Mind you, the lack of feeling displayed by their father, Mu-hyun (Kim Kab-su) borders on the pathological; and the hyper intensity of their stepmother Eun-joo (Yeom Jeong-a) would be enough to drive perfectly sane stepdaughters around the bend, let alone ones who are already profoundly traumatised.

The two girls don't have any time to settle back into the gloomy family house before the weirdness commences: the scuffling of mysterious feet on the polished floorboards; the doubling up of dresses hung in a closet; the pills that Mu-hyun necks after dinner under her husband's watchful eye; the sinister coincidence of her period with Su-yeon's.

All of this is unnerving, but taken together with creepy, subliminal flashbacks and petrifying dream sequences, we know within minutes that some - if not all - of the quartet won't get out of here alive.

Put like that, the scenario may seem banal, but it is the strength of Kim Jee-won's conceit that the family members carry on acting within the parameters of ordinary dysfunction, while their mental states have already become wildly aberrant.

The house itself is the star player in the pantomime of normalcy. A dark, foursquare dwelling with exposed beams and gables which qualify it, if such a thing exists, as an example of Korean Tudorbethan, it is at once gloomy and beautifully clean, full of prosaic middle-class effects and yet harbouring an unspeakable dread.

LITERALLY unspeakable: Dad retreats into moody silence, the sisters into childlike petulance, and Stepmum into a grotesque caricature of gregarious sociability, her trivial chatter stretched across a darkening chasm. This, never more so than in a dinnerparty scene with her brother and sister-in-law, when her reminiscences of childhood induce rampant nausea.

Lee Mogae's camerawork makes the very best of this claustrophobic setting, its angles complementing the sharp corners and polished surfaces of the interiors. The camera doesn't zoom, it lances; it doesn't track, it stabs. The colour shifts from Kodachrome reminiscence, to pastel present, while Lee Byeong-woo's music provides the dense, yet febrile, coloratura of stock horror-Bach.