DEVIANTE

I’m not a fan of horror, and I never really felt curious about this film. For years, because of its title and the atmosphere I imagined it had, I thought it was Japanese — and I’ve always considered J-horror among the very best. I only decided to watch it later, after discovering that it was actually Korean, and above all because one of my favorite actresses was in the cast. I wasn’t sure what to expect: maybe a haunted-house story with the usual ghosts. What I found was much more than that. A Tale of Two Sisters is not simply a horror film — it is a journey into the shattered psyche of a young woman who cannot face her grief.

The story begins with Su-mi returning home after a stay in a psychiatric hospital, accompanied by her younger sister Su-yeon. Their house is big, isolated, and unsettlingly quiet. Living there too are their father, emotionally distant and incapable of truly protecting them, and their stepmother, cold and hostile. From the very first scenes, something feels wrong: the house, surrounded by countryside, already seems inhabited by invisible presences. Doors creak open, strange noises echo at night, corridors feel tighter with each step. The unease builds gradually, in a way that suggests there is more to this story than ghosts.

For much of the film, it looks like a classic ghost story. Su-yeon suffers under the cruelty of the stepmother, Su-mi tries to protect her, and the house is filled with eerie visions and disturbing sounds. But as the tension builds, it becomes harder to ignore that what we’re seeing doesn’t fully make sense. Certain moments contradict each other, characters’ behaviors are inconsistent, and the line between reality and imagination begins to blur.

The revelation is devastating. Su-yeon has been dead for some time, killed in a domestic accident: crushed under a wardrobe while her father and stepmother stood by, failing to intervene. Su-mi has never been able to accept her sister’s death, and everything we have seen is the reflection of her fractured mind. The living sister at her side is only a projection, the cruel stepmother is a distorted embodiment of her grief and rage, and the ghosts are the way her psyche gives shape to memory and guilt.

This is where the film becomes something greater than horror: it is a psychological tragedy about grief and denial. Su-mi has not processed her sister’s death. She rewrites reality to keep her alive, she invents an enemy to fight, she creates visions in order to keep her pain at bay. But denial does not heal — it traps her in the same wound, forcing her to live inside a nightmare she created herself. The house is no longer just a setting; it is her mind. Every room is a memory, every noise a thought she doesn’t want to hear, every vision a fragment of truth she cannot bear to face.

The result is a film that frightens and saddens at the same time. When the truth finally surfaces, there is no relief: no ghost to exorcise, no evil to defeat. Only the image of a young woman destroyed by a grief she cannot confront. In the end, Su-mi is left alone with her ghosts, and so are we.

What lingers after the credits is not fear, but heaviness. There is no catharsis, no victory, no neat ending. Only the realization that if we don’t face loss, we remain trapped in it forever. And while A Tale of Two Sisters tells this story through the language of horror, the truth it carries is universal: the scariest ghosts are not the ones that haunt our houses, but the ones that live inside us when we can’t let go.

A Tale of Two Sisters left me unsettled, of course, but above all, it left me sad. It is not just a scary movie; it is a film about absence, guilt, and memories that refuse to fade. And that is why, even though I don’t usually love horror, I can say I appreciated it deeply. Because behind the blood and the apparitions lies a truth that belongs to all of us: the pain we don’t face stays with us — and sooner or later, it consumes us.