Exhuma

A team of Spiritualists are hired by a wealthy family to excavate a descendant’s lonely mountain-top grave, accidentally unleashing a vengeful spirit in the process, and revealing the family’s long-hidden shameful secrets, as well as the dangerous and bloody legacy that was buried beneath it.

I really liked this film.

Exhuma opens with Hwa-rim, a Korean shaman, and Bong Gil, her young apprentice, flying into Los Angeles after being summoned by the ultra-rich Park family for a well-paying gig. The Parks have hired them to identify a mysterious illness plaguing the family's newborn son. They soon discover that this illness is actually a curse known as "The Grave's Call“ and it was placed on the newborn baby by Mr. Park’s long-dead grandfather.

Apparently, this is a fairly common occurrence.

The Grave’s Call occurs when the spirit of an ancestor has grown angry, usually due to a small issue with their internment, which causes them to throw a tantrum from beyond the grave, and haunt their descendants. Once Hwa-rim and Bong Gil have figured this out, Mr. Park pays them to return to Korea, so they can disinter and relocate his upset grandfather’s grave, all in order to appease his spirit and break the curse.

Dealing with common curses like this is nothing that a Shaman of Hwa-rim’s reputation hasn’t dealt with before, so upon returning to South Korea, she enlists the help of a pair of colleagues to aid in the investigation.

Ko Young Geun is a mortician well-versed in the ancient rituals of caring for the dead. Ki Sang Deok is a P’ungsu geomancer, a kind of monk who uses geographic features, as well as energy flow, to divine the ideal sites for cities, residences, and burial grounds, which then creates happiness and prosperity. These two men will help Hwa-rim and Bong Gil dig up Grandpa Park and bury him in a new spot in such a way that he will be satisfied, and will then rest quietly.

Their investigation leads them to an unmarked, but very strangely and precisely calculated, as well as very intentionally-placed, grave on an isolated mountainside. It’s deep in the woods, a disquieting place of strange energy, where foxes lurk and watch from the tree-line. Ki Sang Deok senses something amiss with the grave site right away, and wants to walk away, but despite the ill omens, Hwa-rim gets them to agree to proceed with the job, convinced that she can perform the proper rituals.

Unfortunately, they soon discover that there is much more buried in that grave than the angry spirit of a long dead grandfather.

Once Grandpa Park's coffin is removed, they discover that there is a giant coffin buried upright beneath it. Dispite the rituals they performed, disturbing the grave not only releases Grandpa Park, who goes on a bloody rampage of vengeance upon his descendants, but it also reveals the shameful secret of how the Park family’s money originated during the Japanese Occupation.

Also, there’s a powerful demon down there too.

And thus, the very common job involving a very common curse suddenly becomes very… uncommon.

After that, Exhuma is a rollercoaster of intense cleansing rituals, of chasing vengeful spirits released from a coffin that shouldn’t have been opened, and of battling a giant undead samurai, all with a couple of ghostly possessions and a few magical protection circles thrown in for good measure, not to mention discovering that a curse has been placed on the entire country of Korea by a powerful Japanese Onmyouji, a man who was also possibly a fox spirit youkai shapeshifter known as a Kitsune. So, it turns out that the whole problem is rooted in the spectre of the Japanese occupation still hanging over the country, and a curse that is known as ”the Fox splitting the spine of the Tiger.”

In the movie, “The Fox” is the evil Kitsune Onmyouji, of course, while “The Tiger” is a reference to the Korean peninsula, which is supposed to resemble the shape of a prowling tiger on the map, and “The Tiger’s Spine” is a reference to the Taebaek and Sobaek mountain ranges, known as Baekdu-daega, which stretches the length of the country.

So, in the movie (not in real life, I assume) in the waning years of the occupation, the Japanese buried a series of metal rods in specific sites across the countryside, specifically along “The Tiger’s Spine.” These metal rods were part of a spell that was meant to block Korea's energy, a curse to sap the strength, energy, prosperity and fortune of the Korean people.

Korean Taoists attempted to remove the metal rods over the years, but the clever Kitsune Onmyouji was ready for such an attempt, and thwarted their efforts not just by using Grandpa Park’s grave to obscure the location of this particular metal rod, but also by taking the slain body of a Japanese general, a man who is said to have killed 10,000 men, and using it to create a monstrous demon. The Kitsune then hid a flaming sword within the general’s body, which acted as the final metal rod. So, if anyone wanted to break this curse, and remove all the metal rods… well, eventually they would have to fight a giant undead samurai, which is really a pretty impressive security system, which is something the various Taoist monks over the years have found out, when the undead samurai tore them to pieces.

So, yeah, it turns out that Grandpa Park wasn't just throwing a tantrum from beyond the grave simply because he was feeling slightly inconvenienced, he had a legitimate complaint, lashed as he was to the curse that was blocking the flow of Korea’s positive energy. Yes, it’s true Grandpa Park had been a collaborator with the Japanese, but still, his spirit had been screaming for decades, trying to sound the alarm, and his descendants had been ignoring it, all while spending their dirty money and living lavishly.

This is why he started killing them as soon as he was released from his grave.

And because the Parks didn’t share any of this information with our investigators, the grave was incorrectly disinterred, the little nure-onna snake demon—that was acting as the guardian for the lower burial—was killed, so the slumbering demon samurai was awakened, and once that happened… then comes the blood, and the running, and the screaming.

Luckily, our heroes know some tricks too, and are eventually able to counter the curse, but it’s definitely a struggle trying to bring balance to the whole situation.

Broken into multiple chapters, with a layered and dense narrative involving religion, superstition, spirituality, horror, and humor, Exhuma is reckoning with the ghosts of Korea’s residual trauma, and its tenuous relationship with Japan, and while all filled with some fantastic imagery. Balancing its folklore horror with a lot of humanity and levity, I really loved the way it all felt like a cop procedural meets magical academia, all in a story that’s basically about a bunch of Private Eye Ghostbusters for hire.

I also loved that, Despite their obviously odd occupations, not to mention the weird and dangerous supernatural world they move through, the characters were all still very believable, all motivated in relatable ways, like they’re all just working stiffs taking care of business. And nobody was wasted either, each character made up an important aspect of the team too, the Geomancer is the veteran’s voice of reason, the Mortician had the dry wit of a man who sees death every day, and the Apprentice was driven by an eager and noble heart. I especially liked how Hwa-rim begins as such a confident and powerful Shaman, until she finds herself suddenly face to face with a real demon, and must then dig deep, overcome her fear, and see that her job is done right.

It’s good stuff.

So yeah, I really enjoyed this film.

I liked the look, the mythos, the action, the story, it was all really fun and interesting. It's maybe not so much "scary" as it is intense, but it’s definitely cool, and reminded me of the kind of thing you might see in an episode of Fringe, or an issue of a comic book like Planetary or Global Frequency, where a group of people, each one an expert in some strange field, each one a part of a wider secret network of similarly strange experts, are forced to deal with some weird otherworldly and very dangerous shit, all while the rest of the world sleeps. That’s just cool.

Big thumbs up.