Let's look at two movies this time. A Korean horror film and the US remake. There has been some good American remakes and some shitty ones. I think Grudge was fine while Shutter lost anything that made the original Thai version great. Anyway, this time they did fairly good job.
Both films are about a girl (Soo-Mi or Su-mi, I don't know which one is right, I've seen both spellings, in the Korean version and Anna in the US version) who loses her already sick mother. Her death is different in the two movies. In the US version she dies in an accident apparently caused by Anna and the Koreans go for the suicide by hanging. But in both versions the girl ends up in a mental institution. For guilt or for sadness, it doesn't matter, she's just cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
Both movies start when she gets to go home from the hospital and can't wait to see her best friend and sister rolled in to one. Theeen the biggest differences start. I'll just say it here, in Uninvited the nurse who their dad hires to take care of their mom is also his lover. But the Korean version isn't so clear. It shows the woman sleeping in their home but at the end I think Soo-mi just made it all up. The nurse is just their fathers colleague and friend. I think...
In both versions the father is and asshole (more so in the US version). Soo-mi/Anna has serious mental problems and the dad is like "Stop that! Don't be so weird.". And that's before the dad realized Soo-mi/Anna thinks that her sister (Soo-Yeon/Alex) is still alive (Oops.. Spoilers..). So yeah, the sister who she had been talking to all through the movie is dead. And again the reasons differ. Alex died in the same accident as their mother, a fire explosion like it matters, and Soo-Yeon died after finding her dead mother hanging in a closet which then fell on her and suffocated her, which is infinitely more interesting and gruesome. And by the way, that's the big Twist in the US version. Anna thought that Alex killed their nurse stepmother but she did it herself. Because... I don't know. She hated the nurse 'cause she had an affair with their dad when their mom was sick. It's stupid.
After it's revealed that Soo-Yeon is dead there's still third of the movie to go. The twist in this version is, like I said before, that almost eveything she thought the nurse was doing she did herself. I guess she hated the nurse because she ignored Soo-mis suffocating sister. I really recommend you watching it youself because I might not even be right about all this. There's some weird shit that I can't seem to place anywhere. Like their fathers friends, a couple that comes to dinner. I think the man saying he doesn't remember the things the nurse is talking about is just because it's not the nurse sitting at the table. It's Soo-mi although the audience sees her at that point as the nurse (there's similar scenes with the nurse and later we see the same things only with Soo-mi). The woman having somekind of a panic attack or an epileptic seizure or something is never explained that well. Then there's fact that Soo-Yeons being abused by someone, but fuck if I know who. That's sometimes the problem with foreign movies. Different culture makes it sometimes really hard to get certain things. You just don't notice something that has meaning in other coutries but not in yours. But if you do some research on "teh interwebs" sometimes you find things you'd never notice.
Tale Of Two Sisters has some nice nods to the original story that it's based on which you can read here.
It's surprising that I'm actually recommending not only to see the original version (well duh, If Asians do something well it's horror) but also the remake. There were some really stupid things but mostly it's a decent remake and worth to watch especially if you've seen the Korean version.
