An immensely well-crafted horror thriller, Exhuma is one of the year's best horror flicks.
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Something I always find fascinating are cultural taboos. The little nuances of the human experience, based on locality, that can turn a positive gesture in one culture into an insult in another. Or how different cultures celebrate becoming an adult in the eyes of their community. And also...grieving and death. Which brings me to this awesome South Korean import Exhuma that follows a group of South Korean spiritualists and funeral planners that come up against a powerful force.
The Setup
The film centers around two Korean shaman who are enlisted by a wealthy real estate magnate to identify and remove the mysterious illness plaguing their newborn son. But when the pair comes across a powerful curse, they'll have to enlist the help of a Feng shui master and a mortician to purge the curse...before it kills all of them.
From a structural standpoint, Exhuma looks and feels a lot like other paranormal possession movies. We've got our team with their specialties all trying to unravel what's coming after this rich family and find out how to stop it. The same general playbook that James Wan and company like to use for The Conjuring and Insidious movies. Bring in a terrifying and deadly ghost, assemble the team, fight the ghost.
So what makes this one stand out?
So what makes this one stand out?
Skillfully Weaved Into South Korean Culture and History
Something I think American horror movies often fail to do, is to ingratiate American culture and history into said movies. You can argue about movies like Halloween feeling like a uniquely American expression of suburban paranoia, but usually if they bring in a ghost, it's a ghost from like the 1800s that's just really evil. Even The Conjuring series leans pretty heavily into "old witches" being real.
In Exhuma's case, the movie is tangling with ongoing issues in South Korean culture and historical aspects. In the present, almost every member of this little group is frustrated with how mercenary their work is. Our Feng shui expert, Kim Sang-deok for instance, makes his living picking out funeral plots for rich people because he's saving up for his daughter's wedding. The unsaid aspect, that comes up later, is that the average person can't afford his work and won't benefit from it. So instead of helping a bunch of people he's helping...people who probably don't need that much help.
The other aspect is this haunting's ties to South Korean history. Specifically the Japanese occupation and the eventual divide between North and South Korea. Not subtle at all either. The grave they're looking at is almost at the infamous 38th parallel and overlooks North Korea. Which means that this exorcism job comes with the added thrust of rejecting Japanese or fascist influence. Great stuff.
A Slow Burn Mystery
Another reason I like this movie so much is that it treats its haunting like a mystery to be solved. That gives the movie a natural narrative propulsion as the possessions get worse and the team gets more and more pieces of the puzzle.
Exhuma also does what a lot of horror mysteries fail to do. It builds up the threat as the movie goes along. For a lot of horror mysteries it's hard to maintain the tension because either your list of suspects is shrinking as more bodies pile up or whatever information you learn isn't that scary.
Exhuma also does what a lot of horror mysteries fail to do. It builds up the threat as the movie goes along. For a lot of horror mysteries it's hard to maintain the tension because either your list of suspects is shrinking as more bodies pile up or whatever information you learn isn't that scary.
This movie threads that needle beautifully by giving us a creepy possession sequence that introduces a new piece of information and then revealing what that all means...and what it means is even worse than they originally thought. This group is constantly having to backtrack their previous work or expand their circle of helpers because the threat is getting more powerful as the movie goes on.
Wonderfully Creepy Sequences
This is the bread and butter for the genre and it doesn't disappoint. And it Exhuma's case, it uses the big cast of characters to ramp up the tension in each sequence. I'll use an example without details to explain what I mean.
At a certain point our characters are pretty certain that they need to cremate a body to stop this ghost. But they also need approval from the family to do it. So while one character is trying to have a conversation, the rest of the gang are dealing with a possessed person or prep the body for cremation. Oh and meanwhile we see that this ghost is about to attack a baby. It's the same logic behind mutli-tiered action sequences. If you present multiple fronts you can maintain the tension by switching back and forth until it resolves.
Hey Hollywood...This Is How You Shoot Night Sequences
One of my least favorite things about a lot of Hollywood productions is how night time sequences look like ass. They're either hard to follow because of poor lighting or everything in the room is so dimly it almost doesn't look real. It's my biggest ding against David Fincher's recent work. Everything, including light scenes indoors at night, have this dim green yellow fuzziness to them.
Whereas this movie has tons of sequences at night that look...slick and easy to follow because the lighting ensures that the characters stand out via their skin having sheen or differences in texture. And if something is hard to make out, that's on purpose because they're about to reveal something or it's not important to the action of the scene.
The Verdict: Expertly Made
An immensely well-crafted horror thriller, Exhuma is one of the year's best horror flicks. 8/10
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