Exhuma (2024)

Exhuma arrives with the confidence of a film that knows exactly which ghosts it wants to disturb. A shaman, a geomancer, an undertaker and an apprentice gather around a wealthy family's ancestral grave near the North Korean border, and for a long while the proceedings are pure procedure: rituals, coffins, soil, the going rate for a respectable burial site. Director Jang Jae-hyun shoots it with documentary patience. The horror is administered in increments. It works.

The film's politics are national, not intersectional. Its villain is a Japanese shaman who buried iron spikes across the peninsula during the occupation, a mythology of colonial sabotage that supplies the third act with its gravity. This is a country working through its own history, and the film treats that history as a wound, not a talking point. A female shaman anchors the story, but the screenplay has no interest in gender politics; she is a professional with a job to do, and nobody asks her to justify her presence. Wealthy clients pay the bills. Nobody eats them. No character pauses to instruct the audience on their own identity, and the ensemble is Korean because the film is Korean. There is nothing here to check off a list, and the film seems content to leave it that way.

Where the picture does lean toward the sermon is its final stretch, when the mythology of the spikes and the samurai guardian is laid out in exposition. It is necessary information, delivered plainly, and it lands as plot instead of preaching. We have all sat through far worse offenders. Exhuma is a genre exercise with a national memory lodged in its throat, and it never mistakes that memory for a lecture. A sommelier would call this a clean vintage: dark, mineral, faintly bitter at the finish. Recommended.