This tale of vengeful spirits moves with the purpose of a motorcade of black SUVs. Directed by Jang Jae-hyun, it tells an updated Korean folktale about the haunting of a wealthy family and the deeper historical tension between Japanese and Korean society.
In the opening scenes, female shaman Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her protégé Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) are whisked to Los Angeles to diagnose the source of a family’s distress as the “Grave’s Call.” They then enlist veteran geomancer and feng shui master Kim Sang-deok and undertaker Go Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin), who accept a substantial fee to exhume and relocate Park Ji-yong’s grandfather’s grave.
Sang-deok, played by veteran actor Choi Min-sik, is that wonderful kind of unprepossessing anti-hero who never trusts the appearance of things and is the first to detect the gap in the Park family narrative. He also has the most to lose: the large fee is needed for his daughter’s wedding, yet his first response to the unmarked grave — located in an inaccessible spot near the North Korean border — is to hesitate and try to call off the exhumation.
Hwa-rim and Bong-gil can hardly wait to get the knives and drums out for a gut (a substitution ritual) while Yeong-geun and the diggers open the grave. Everything proceeds smoothly until a gravedigger accidentally cuts the head off a human-headed snake crawling in the pit. The show must go on, but the plot begins to twist as the team races to cremate the coffin before anything can escape.
Jang Jae-hyun has said he approaches material by looking “beyond the surface” to the underlying core, and he prepared for the film by attending multiple real exhumations. In the plot, the family curse is rooted in the grandfather’s collaboration with Japanese colonial authorities, which opens a further layer of negative spiritual and cultural inheritance for the story to uncover.
Kim Go-eun’s transformation from her detached composure as a professional soothsayer to flesh-eating, knife-wielding goddess during the pig sacrifice is spectacular. As a young Korean performer she is also drawing on cultural capital from a traditional female collective practice. Jang has said his aunt is a shaman and that he grew up around the mudang rituals. Lee Do-hyun’s Bong-gil is also very masculine and sexy, his torso conveniently covered in tattooed Buddhist sutras to help protect him during possession.
Exhuma was the highest-grossing Korean film of 2024, with roughly 11.9 million admissions in South Korea and about 115 billion won at the local box office. It was treated as a clear commercial film: a star-driven ensemble that moved Jang Jae-hyun from reliable mid-level genre success to a top-tier commercial director in Korea.
It is no mean feat to make an older generation’s concerns — securing a good grave site, and nurturing a long-standing resentment toward Japan — feel like a living part of what it means to be a modern Korean.
Exhuma screened as part of the ‘Hellhouse’ Halloween film festival, Sydney Opera House, 28.11.26.
Media provided by SOH.
