Sycophantic tongue-waggers marching to the "less is more" sound of Kyoshi Kurosawa's success have seen to an influx of quotidian, breath-on-a-windowpane horror that, well, isn't actually scary. If it's dread you're after, as opposed to dimestore nerve-wrangling, then subtraction alone won't do; the director has to work towards equating the physical with the meta-physical, so that seemingly arbitrary acts of violence start to be persist according to their own logic.

Not that Ji-woon Kim gives a fuck. His A Tale of Two Sisters takes its plush, Victorian detailing and ditches the implied ethereality in favour of straight-laced brutality. And of course, what J/K-horror film would be complete without the purveyors of said bloodshed being anything other than sulky, Asian schoolgirls? Appropriately fringed, Bae Soo-mi and Bae Soo-yeon engage in a psychological gang bang that's Mulholland Drive-lite – and more incomprehensible than intuitive – all the while failing to rest until every bit of fetishistically detailed upholstery has been stained with some part of their stepmother. Over the course of things, a steady stream of gross-outs manage to work their way into a frenzied narrative breakdown, the film becoming like a disintegrating record caught on the same abhorrent scenario. By the time that happens, you can bet that every fanboy extraordinaire'll have hit the imdb boards with an account of how the monster behind Winkie's is actually the stepmother's great uncle. Though that, along with the inevitable tombs of additional interpretations, probably aren't all that necessary, given that it's just as palatable on a gut level; Ji-woon may demonstrate an overreliance on the slow-burn reveal, but it's not exactly something you're going to be debating over as you're forced 2-inches into your seat, squirming.—David Levinson

» Kim Ji-woon | South Korea | 2003