Exhuma (2024)

Few fears are as instinctive as the sense that something has been buried wrong beneath the earth. Exhuma draws up that ancient dread from the Korean soil of geomancy and shamanism. Director Jang Jae-hyun, who honed his grammar of the occult through The Priests and Svaha, this time unspools it into a more popular and straightforward story. The result drew rare box-office success for a Korean occult film, surpassing ten million admissions. Because the back half shifts in texture compared to the gripping first half, the rating I land on stays at ★3.5.

What it’s about — The people who move a grave

A wealthy Korean American family is plagued by an inexplicable misfortune passed down through the generations. The young shamans Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) conclude that its root lies in an ancestor’s grave, and they bring in the seasoned geomancer Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and the undertaker Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin). The four decide to dig up a suspicious grave set deep in a rugged mountain. But the exhumation does not end ordinarily. What begins inside the coffin spreads down to the village at the foot of the mountain, and what had been buried slowly comes to light. The film treats the very act of digging up the grave like a vast ritual, building tension as it goes.

Direction — A hand joining two stories

The most impressive part of Jang Jae-hyun’s direction is his ability to build atmosphere. Mist-shrouded mountains, damp earth, an old coffin, the drumbeats of a ritual, every sense is densely mobilized. The exhumation and ritual scenes of the first half in particular wield the sights and sounds of Korean shamanism head-on, creating powerful immersion. That said, the film divides largely into two stories, and the texture of those two parts is quite different. Where the first half is a folkloric, dank mystery, the second half turns sharply into a different kind of horror. Some viewers will take this shift as fresh, but no small number will feel that the atmosphere built up earlier comes undone.

Performance — A balance struck by four actors

Choi Min-sik renders a geomancer hardened by long experience with weighty presence. In his figure, reading the soil and the wind, the pride and fatigue of a professional are steeped together. Yoo Hae-jin slyly takes on the role of letting human air into a heavy story. Above all, Kim Go-eun’s shaman performance is intense. In the ritual scenes she throws her whole body in and dominates the screen. The structure of binding two generations, a young shaman and a seasoned geomancer, into one team is intriguing as well. The chemistry of the four actors holds the film’s center.

What the film says — The past does not vanish just because it is buried

What Exhuma deals with at its core is an unsettled past. The premise that leaving something buried wrong will eventually bring calamity down on the descendants reaches beyond one family’s history to evoke a larger history. As the film moves into its back half, it metaphorically touches the wounds carved into this land and the things layered over them. What to bury and what to dig up, and how to face what is buried. This question quietly operates beneath the occult shell.

Ratings & reception

The IMDb score is 6.9, the Rotten Tomatoes freshness is 93%, and the Metacritic score is 80. Unusually for the Korean occult genre, it earned a good response overseas as well, and at home it drew ten million admissions for box-office success. Many feel it captured both genre polish and mass appeal at once.

Verdict

Exhuma is a well-made occult film that uses Korean material head-on to draw a broad audience. The polish of the first half, building atmosphere, is especially impressive. That said, the shift in direction in the back half divides opinion, and the two stories do not connect entirely smoothly. Even so, the actors’ solid performances and Jang Jae-hyun’s signature dank mise-en-scène are well worth watching. If you want to experience the familiar yet unfamiliar world of Korean shamanism and geomancy on a big screen, it is a choice you will not regret.

Recommended for

• Those who enjoy the occult genre rooted in Korean material
• Those who prefer films strong in atmosphere and mise-en-scène
• Those who want to see the acting chemistry of Choi Min-sik and Kim Go-eun