ABSTRACT
Kim Jee-woon's 2003 psychological thriller A Tale of Two Sisters broke domestic box office records in Korea, and, simultaneously, its phenomenally successful debut on American screens, a first for the Korean film industry, marked Korea's entrance into the global theater of international cinema. The film received both popular and critical praise for its unique cinematic voice, which is quintessentially uncanny, a taut amalgamation of the familiar and the strange. Hallyu and A Tale of Two Sisters, as its hallmark cinematic expression, are constituted in part by the way they interrogate the assumptions driving Korean collective identity. Kim deploys the classic technique of dissolve to depict the disassembly of the white flower from the thick green and red mesh; cinematographically, this "saturates" the "Blackthorn" design to intimate that the fetus may have been disengaged from the womb via means of solvents.
