The surface of the frozen ground breaks and the shovel bites into the soil. The camera of 「Exhuma」 gazes at earth that has been pressed down for a long time. The face of the ghost comes after that. The film does not leave the side of the pit, asking what is set loose the moment that ground is opened again.
It is a 2024 work written and directed by Jang Jae-hyun. Choi Min-sik plays Kim Sang-deok, a feng shui master who reads land; Kim Go-eun plays Lee Hwa-rim, a shaman who soothes vengeful spirits; Yoo Hae-jin plays Ko Yeong-geun, an undertaker who observes the rites; and Lee Do-hyun plays Yoon Bong-gil, a beopsa who chants sutras. The story begins with the newborn of a wealthy Korean American family in the United States suffering from an unexplained illness. Hwa-rim reads it as a "call from the grave" summoned by an ancestor's vengeful spirit, and she calls in Sang-deok and Yeong-geun to set out and move the grave.
Where the four of them arrive is a rural village in Korea, and a grave placed on a site suspicious for burying anyone. It opened on February 22, 2024, and before that it was shown on February 16 in the Forum section of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival. It earned $93.9 million worldwide, taking first place at the Korean box office that year, and became the thirty-second Korean film to draw ten million admissions. Now, ahead of its second Seollal since release, what remains last in memory is the list of occupations rather than the box office figures.
The list this film handed to audiences is feng shui master and undertaker, shaman and beopsa. The four names stand on screen as occupations with their own tools and procedures, not as headwords in a folklore dictionary. The one who reads the land and the one who observes the rites, the one who soothes vengeful spirits and the one who chants sutras each keep their own order before a single grave. The biggest piece of information was that such concrete labor passes back and forth over where and how to lay the dead.
As Seollal approaches, the choice between grave visits and grass cutting, reburial and cremation actually comes up at family tables. Every year a decision is made between keeping a grave and clearing it, and each decision requires someone's hands. 「Exhuma」 does not lecture about this reality. By showing how many people and procedures the opening of a single grave calls for, it says that funerary culture is labor still in motion, not heritage placed in a museum.
The strength of the direction is concentrated in the first half. While the excavation serves as the axis that keeps the audience inside the procedures, the horror comes from sound and soil and waiting. The camera that lingers on a pit whose contents are unknown withholds explanation, and the characters speak through their own professional ethics.
The second half is different. As what is buried beneath the grave expands past one family's grudge into a larger history, the professional specificity built up in the first half yields ground to symbolism. The people who read soil with their fingertips become carriers of allegory, and the grain of the four characters thins out as well.
That expansion is hard to call a failure. It is closer to a big picture that would have been needed once to speak of heritage in popular terms.
At gravesites before Seollal, dry grass remains as it was, and the sickles and shovels used for grass cutting have wintered in a corner of the shed. The hands that take those tools out again are not much different from the hands in the excavation scenes on screen. The soil around the burial mound and the mountain ridges running behind it are still land managed by someone's labor. The pit that 「Exhuma」 lingered on turns out to have been a cross section of that land.
