Review | Exhuma movie review: compelling Korean supernatural thriller starring Choi Min-sik and Kim Go-eun
- Oldboy star Choi excels as a supernatural investigator who is tasked with protecting a newborn who shows signs of distress despite being perfectly healthy
- The cause is traced back to the infant’s grandfather, whose headstone has bad feng shui and strange markings, and a cleansing ritual is performed
4/5 stars
Choi Min-sik leads a team of paranormal investigators tasked with digging up ghosts of the past, both literal and metaphorical, in Jang Jae-hyun’s new supernatural thriller Exhuma, which is already the year’s biggest hit at the Korean box office.
Exhuma is not the first time Jang has explored the collision of ideas and ideologies between religion and ritual. To date, all of the writer-director’s feature films, including The Priests (2015) and Svaha: The Sixth Finger (2019), have broached similar territory, but his latest emerges as far and away his most complete and compelling effort yet.
His infant son has shown signs of distress since the moment he was born, despite displaying no medical issues. Hwa-rim quickly ascertains that the issue has affected all of the family’s firstborn males, and traces the source back to Park’s ancestral grandfather, who is buried back in Korea.
