30. EXHUMATION POINT: Digging up the past one coffin at a tomb time.

Korean shaman Lee Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her assistant Yoon Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) have been hired by a wealthy Korean American family to determine why their infant son is sick. It turns out to be something called the Grave’s Call, as an ancestor wants something from them. They take the family’s eldest member, Park Ji-Yong (Kim Jae-cheol) to the grave of his grandfather, along with a Feng Shui expert named Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin), a funeral home owner, to see what they can do to stop the curse.

Kim Sang-deok is wary and doesn’t trust the entitled family and their plans to excavate the grave without cremating what is left. Hwa-rim and Bong-gil perform their ritual and a human headed snake appears. As you can figure out, this is a bad omen. Then, a custodian opens the coffin, hoping to find treasure. This unleashes the angry spirit of the grandfather, who worked with the Japanese during War World II and was never given a proper burial. He kills Park Ji-Yong and several members of his family before Sang-deok cremates the grave and saves the child.

Months later, Yeong-geun and Sang-deok meet with the gravedigger who killed the snake, who has been upset since. The grandfather’s grave site was sold to him by a man named Gisune, who ends up being a Japanese shaman named Murayama Junji, who has been killing local priests and animals. Hwa-rim and Bong-gi are attacked by this samurai ghost, which becomes a ball of flame before possessing Bong-gil.

Then we learn the major plan of the Japanese, which was to leave iron spikes throughout Korean, enabling them to destroy the magic energy of the country and claim it. Gisune has been protecting his spike, which is a headless samurai, inside the grave of the grandfather. The four gather to remove this magic from their homeland and end the reign of the Japanese ghost.

Korean shamanism is something I haven’t seen much of in movies and director and writer Jang Jae-hyun has created something really wild here. It’s a bit long for those without much attention, but it’s also nearly two movies worth of story as you can consider the reveal of the Japanese magic to almost be a sequel.

The director may be a Christian deacon, but he had his actors study real rituals from shamans in order to accurately portray them. There was even a shaman on set.

Yet this is about more than magic. The four heroes are named for the martyrs of South Korea who fought against Japanese colonial rule. There are some big ideas in this and it’s worth taking the time to absorb it.