Writer-director Jang Jae-hyun's Exhuma begins with a spiteful, intrafamilial haunting. An elder ancestor, whose agitated spirit apparently loathes the place where it has been laid to rest, exerts a cross-continental hold on its descendants. This bony grip afflicts the children of Kim Jae-cheol's Park Ji-yong, smothering out their young lives just as they are struggling into the world. And so this wealthy, Korean American real estate developer gathers a team in South Korea - including Oldboy's Choi Min-ski as a feng shui expert and a strikingly composed shaman played by Kim Go-eun - to excavate a remote gravesite, overlooking the North, in the hopes that this will appease the jealous spirit. Told on bitter grounds that teem with supernatural pests, Exhuma strikes an unusual note when describing its ghosts. Jang's film is less interested in the interpersonal strife of this autophagic family than expected, leaving damning tales of abuse or neglect unspoken. Instead, Exhuma prefers to examine the kind of rotten bastard that would smother its descendants in their cots on a much broader canvas, one that encompasses the destruction of Korea as a unified country and this great-grandparent's collaboration with the insidious, colonial designs of a foreign power. Jang's film is told in a series of ceremonies, each given power and meaning by those practising these many, clashing rituals. Unlike, say, The Wailing, in Exhuma we are always in the company of experts, all of whom are desperately trying to make sense of a haunting that seems unending, or perhaps more accurately, unquenchable.
