Jang Jae-hyun’s Exhuma unearths more than a haunted grave—it digs into the roots of Korean history, bloodlines, and the uneasy truce between superstition and reality. A blend of folklore, mystery, and slow-burning dread, the film reaches for horror but finds its real strength in unraveling its mystery. It lingers in the past, tangled in ancestral guilt and the cycle of life, death, and what refuses to stay buried.
The story follows renowned shaman Lee Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her protégé Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) who are enlisted by a wealthy Korean-American family to investigate the mysterious illness of their newborn son. Their search leads them to the child’s ancestor, whose plain grave, nestled in a breathtaking plot overlooking North Korea, calls out for attention. Enter feng shui expert Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and mortician Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin), two men who, despite their disdain for the ultra-rich, agree to relocate the grave for a hefty payout: Sang-deok needs money for his daughter’s wedding; Yeong-geun is always looking for another job. But as the excavation begins, it’s clear the past has been stirring long before the first shovel ever touched the earth.
Exhuma thrives in its cultural specificity. The film is steeped in shamanistic rituals, folklore, and geomantic wisdom—fox spirits lurk at burial sites, dirt is tasted for its yin-yang balance, and exorcisms unfold with methodical precision. Jang lets these details breathe, ensuring that every incantation and ritual feels rooted in belief rather than spectacle. The best moments are not the ones that scream horror but those that whisper it—the reflection of something that shouldn’t be there, a movement just out of frame.
Yet, for all its ancient rituals and buried curses, Exhuma is firmly set in the modern day. The team is suspended between tradition and contemporary skepticism—Hwa-rim performs a ritual in Converse sneakers while Yeong-geun casually checks his weather app to time a cremation. They navigate a world where the old ways still hold power, but not without a knowing glance, a muttered doubt. Even as they follow ingrained beliefs, there’s hesitation—a scoff, a snort of disbelief—until they see the evil for themselves.
Anchoring the unease is Choi Min-sik, who delivers a performance that salvages the film from the surprisingly stiff, uninspired turns of Kim Go-eun and Lee Do-hyun. While they struggle to inject depth into their roles, Choi commands the screen with the weight of someone who has seen it all and carries that knowledge like a familiar burden. His presence steadies Exhuma through its uneven moments, grounding it in something far more compelling than the script itself.
Still, the film wavers between the grounded and the excessive. Exhuma is at its strongest when it leans into its mystery, treating supernatural elements with restraint. But as the story unfolds, the subtle eeriness gives way to broader, more overt horror. The CGI—a writhing snake with a human head, a flaming demon lord—feels artificial against the film’s otherwise realistic world. The pacing is also terribly uneven, with moments of hypnotic tension abruptly punctuated by action that feels rushed or misplaced. One particularly grotesque scene—a woman dancing in front of the television, lost in imagined fame while her husband’s heart is crushed by an unseen force—makes an impression not for its horror but for its unsettling intimacy.
Beneath the curses at play, Exhuma carries a far deeper wound, one rooted in history, wartime betrayal, and unresolved racial tensions. The film addresses these themes directly, particularly in its depiction of Japan’s presence in Korea’s past. What begins as an ancestral curse spirals into something far more tangled, where loyalty and treachery blur and history refuses to stay buried. At the heart of it all is the question, “Who deserves to be haunted?” The answer, like much of the film, is shrouded in contradiction.
Despite its missteps, Exhuma maintains a thick, palpable mood—one that lingers like damp earth on your skin. The sound design is particularly effective, amplifying the film’s most atmospheric sequences, while the cinematography captures both the grand and the grotesque. Even as the film wrestles with its identity, straddling horror, mystery, and historical reckoning, it never loses sight of one truth: we live, die, and are born again without end.
