A Tale Of Two Sisters VS The Uninvited

"We survive by remembering. But sometimes we survive by forgetting."

Welcome back! This is newsletter #15, and I hit a new subscriber goal a few days before I'm writing this, so it's fitting that I'm doing things a little differently this time. I've never written about two films and compared them in one newsletter, and initially, I only planned on writing about A Tale Of Two Sisters. However, after watching it and realizing how different it was from its American remake, The Uninvited, which I've seen several times, I decided I should explore both of them. 

The Uninvited came out in 2009, a year I could only describe as the horror film renaissance. Throughout 2008 and 2009, movie theaters were flooded with scary movies like One Missed Call, When A Stranger Calls, The Strangers, and The Haunting In Connecticut. Some of them were remakes of films from other countries, and others were originals, but I remember spending many nights in the late 2000s watching the new generation of horror films in my living room before streaming when you still had to rent movies on demand or from a video rental store. 

Among the jumble of scary movies was a psychological thriller called The Uninvited, and in my opinion, it's one of the best. It received mixed reviews upon release, but even after rewatching it for my newsletter, I still think it's genius. It was years later that I learned it was actually an American remake of the 2003 South Korean film A Tale Of Two Sisters.

A Tale Of Two Sisters. 2003. Tartan Films.

I expected the Korean film to be pretty similar to the American one, but the two could easily stand alone as the storylines are drastically different. Both films follow a teenage girl upon her release from a mental hospital after her mother's death. However, her return home is far from peaceful. 

I immediately noticed that A Tale Of Two Sisters is visually stunning and aesthetically pleasing in a way The Uninvited isn't. There are some beautiful shots in the American film, like an aerial view of the mountains and trees when Anna's father, Steven, is driving her home at the beginning of the film, but where The Uninvited appears more like a typical big production company horror film, A Tale Of Two Sisters is a true work of art. 

The Korean movie moves at a much slower pace and feels more like a psychological thriller or drama than a horror film. The Uninvited, on the other hand, is fast-paced with more jump scares and a darker tone, evoking more fear and anxiety.

When dissecting the characters, there's an obvious distinction between what Korean culture and American culture want to see on screen. Disclaimer, if I am getting any of the names wrong or the spelling incorrect, blame Wikipedia! 

In A Tale Of Two Sisters, the main character Su-mi returns home and reunites with her younger sister, Su-yeon. Su-yeon is very timid, while Su-mi is more outspoken. She's not afraid to stand up to her father or her stepmother, while Su-yeon seems to quiver in her body, hoping her older sister will handle every situation for her. 

The Uninvited. 2009. Paramount Pictures.

The Uninvited did what Hollywood does best, casting a beautiful, tall, thin actress as Anna's sister Alex. The role went to Arielle Kebbel, who is best known for portraying Cecilia Banks in 2006's Aquamarine. Cecilia was the vicious, mean girl after Raymond who would do anything to tear him away from Aqua and expose to the world that Aqua is a mermaid. While her The Uninvited character is less malicious, she's equally stereotypically desirable. 

Alex follows the "bad, party girl trope," often coming home drunk to her better-behaved sister. In The Uninvited, Alex is older than Anna and is rougher around the edges than Su-yeon. She's not afraid to tell it like it is, argue with her father, and disrespect her stepmother while Anna stays on her best behavior, hoping not to end up in the mental hospital again. 

Hollywood's built its foundation on the phrase "sex sells," which was more prevalent in the 2000s than in modern day. While Su-yeon's personality worked well in A Tale Of Two Sisters, American culture looked for something different around the time The Uninvited premiered. Jennifer's Body was released eight months after The Uninvited, and Meghan Fox's character is a prime example of what Americans were looking for from female characters in 2009. 

A Tale Of Two Sisters. 2003. Tartan Films.

In both films, the main character's stepmother was initially her mother's nurse, but while her mother was sick, the stepmother had an affair with her father. Once her mother died, they were able to finally be together. However, both films portray the relationships differently. In A Tale Of Two Sisters, Su-mi's father Moo-hyeon, and stepmother, Eun-joo, seemingly despise each other. The film's plot describes them as being in a sexless marriage, a stark difference from the Hollywoodification of Steven's relationship with Anna's stepmom Rachel. 

In The Uninvited, Rachel isn't yet Anna's stepmother, but she and Steven seem to really love each other, enough so that he tells Anna he plans to marry her. The films also have a drastically different approach to the stepmothers. Both portray the stepmoms through the main characters' perspectives, but while Rachel seems like a genuinely nice person, other than having an affair with a man while his wife was dying, Eun-joo is a little eviler, which is revealed at the end of the film.

The big twist both films reveal is that most of the storyline is the hallucinations of Su-mi and Anna. Both Su-yeon and Alex are dead, and Su-mi and Anna only imagined they were with them the whole movie. However, each film has a different approach to the subject, both ending with the main characters going back to the mental hospital. 

A Tale Of Two Sisters. 2003. Tartan Films.

In A Tale Of Two Sisters, Eun-joo plays a more crucial role than Rachel does in The Uninvited. Eun-joo is being haunted by a ghost throughout the film, adding a supernatural element aside from Su-mi's hallucinations. At the end of A Tale Of Two Sisters, the ghost of Su-yeon kills Eun-joo. It turns out, Su-mi and Su-yeon's mother hung herself after she found out her husband was having an affair with Eun-joo. 

When Su-yeon found her, she tried to save her but ended up knocking over the wardrobe her mother hung herself in, and it fell on her. Eun-joo found both of them but left the room, and when she almost went back to save Su-yeon, she changed her mind because of a negative encounter with Su-mi. While the evil personality Eun-joo possessed throughout the film was actually an aspect of Su-mi's consciousness projected out as Eun-joo because of her dissociative identity disorder, Eun-joo actually was a villain. 

The Uninvited. 2009. Paramount Pictures.

The Uninvited takes a much different approach with Rachel. Throughout the film, Anna is on Rachel's side as Alex tries to convince her that Rachel is bad. From Anna's perspective, Rachel does and says a lot of suspicious things, but without context, Rachel's behavior is pretty normal. It isn't until the end of the film that Rachel's behavior becomes scary, and it's seemingly because she notices Anna has resorted back to her old ways. 

There is also no ghost in The Uninvited. Everything is Anna's own imagination playing tricks on her based on the stories her friend in the mental hospital told her. A Tale Of Two Sisters is a twisted movie, but The Uninvited is twisted in a different way. It removes the supernatural element and tricks the audience into being on Anna's side when the whole time, she's an unreliable main character. 

Rachel ends up dying at the end of The Uninvited because Anna thinks she's trying to murder her and Alex, so she kills Rachel, believing that Alex was the one to kill her. However, Alex actually died the same day as their mother did in an accidental explosion in the boat house where their mother stayed while she was sick. 

One thing both films did use is a scene where a disheveled girl jumps out from under the kitchen sink (in The Uninvited, it was the oven.) In A Tale Of Two Sisters, it's the ghost that jumps out from under the sink at Eun-joo, but in The Uninvited, it's a young red-headed girl who jumps out at Anna, warning her, "you're next." It was one of the few jump scares in A Tale Of Two Sisters, but one of many that marks The Uninvited as a late 2000s horror film.

I was expecting to come out of watching A Tale Of Two Sisters favoring one film over the other and likely enjoying the original film more because it's a popular opinion that the original is always the best. Though, once I realized how drastically different the movies were, I found it impossible to pick a favorite. 

The Uninvited. 2009. Paramount Pictures.

One element I really love about The Uninvited that set it apart from A Tale Of Two Sisters, making it feel like a completely different movie, was the inclusion of Anna's friend at the mental hospital, Mildred Kemp. As I mentioned, there is no ghost in The Uninvited, though the movie tricks viewers into thinking Anna is seeing the ghost of a young girl Rachel once killed. 

After realizing Rachel has a fake name on her ID, which Steven clarified was because of a past abusive boyfriend she ran from, Anna and Alex research her and connect her back to a nanny named Mildred Kemp, who murdered the children she was taking care of because she was obsessed with their widowed father. 

Anna's discovery was not a discovery at all, but the story her friend told her because her friend actually was Mildred Kempt. This is unveiled at the end of the film when Mildred returns to her room, closes her door, and the name tag on the door reads Mildred Kemp. I thought this was very clever and pulled the whole film together. 

Out of all the late 2000s horror films, The Uninvited remains my favorite, but I'm glad I watched A Tale Of Two Sisters, and I understand why it had more positive reviews. I would recommend everyone watches both movies and tries to go into each without expectations and without comparing them to each other. 

Next week I'll be back to my usual analysis, just in time for my Mother's Day newsletter, where I'm covering a little movie you might know that's set in Greece! But for this one, I hope the switch-up was enjoyable and not too horrifying, as I know there were a lot of heavy topics in here. If this scared you too much, go watch something funny or read one of my happier newsletters to shake off the horror!