Part of Hoop-Tober

“I’ll always be with you.”

In close-up, a man washes his hands carefully and repeatedly. His hands do not appear dirty. He has not, so far as we can tell, just used the toilet, nor is he preparing to eat or to engage in some practice necessitating sterility. He is merely awaiting a conversation. Nonetheless, he is fastidious about his washing. It is a curious image with which to begin Kim Jee-Woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters, but one that, eventually, makes a great deal of sense. For hand-washing, in the grand tradition of Pontius Pilate, is commonly associated with the cleansing of guilt, and guilt hangs over Kim’s picture like a deathly shroud.

Of course, hand-washing…

vague spoiler warning

i do not think the scene where all three characters get their periods at once is a throwaway. curiously, it's one of the bloodier moments of the film: the specks of blood on the bed are given the same weight as the tears on a nightgown when an altercation goes down later in the film. it's a brief moment of connection for three very different women (well...) before they splinter apart again, locked inside a dark house and all battling their own ghosts.

the young woman at the center of this movie is on the midst of puberty and adulthood- again i do not think this was a mere coincidence. she's angry and confused and sad, thrown…

Are you crazy?

The past is a ghost we can never escape from, hence the phrase haunted by guilt. It sticks with us like a black, ugly mist and any effort to contain it would only backfire and cause it to spill out and seep into our surroundings, into the blood red wallpaper, the neatly arranged furniture, the scattered pills, and the most terrifying place of them all: the cold, damp corner under the sink. This is a haunted house not because of it's location, but the disturbed beings that inhabit it. This is a tale of two sisters concerning a family a four, no five, six, seven, wait but don't forget the little girl roaming between hallways, the phantom…