Fairy Tale and Film

A Tale of Two Sisters
(Kim Jee-woon, 2003), which 
reprises the likes of ‘Snow White’ in terms of a seemingly wicked step-
mother, yet also advises us to rethink assumptions by revealing a com-
bination of denial and transference at work.
21
A Gothic horror, situated 
in a disturbed family home, the story is framed as the recollection of an 
adolescent girl, Su-mi (Im Soo-jung), relating events to a psychiatrist – a 
device that informs us that a very subjective (and perhaps suspect) nar-
rative position is taken in the family portrait provided. The film’s mes-
merising mise-en-scène is justifiably renowned, yet the strangeness of 
its central performances is especially notable. The stepmother appears 
to be the most ‘normal’ of all the characters, which is odd, given the 
enmity with which she is regarded by Su-mi. The father is absurdly 
disengaged throughout, yet shown to be the cause of their conflict and 
consequently the trauma haunting the house. In one of his few lines 
of dialogue he admits to having been a ‘bad father’, although his role 
as a husband is more in question, having been involved with his new 
wife when Su-mi’s mother was still alive. What happened to the mother 
is the mystery we assume to be at the heart of the story, yet 
A Tale of 
Two Sisters
deceives us in a number of ways. This includes its marketing 
image: a family portrait in which two girls sit in bloodstained clothes 

---

130 
Fairy Tale and Film
behind their smiling stepmother, accompanied by the tag line ‘fairy 
tales were never this grimm’. In fact, the film pours cold water on the 
‘wicked stepmother’ trope, with Su-mi’s trauma revealed as a repressed 
memory that has distorted her perceptions. Initially stemming from a 
relatively ordinary event, losing her mother and gaining a substitute, 
this deepens into a complex tragedy. We realise that her younger sister, 
Su-yeon (Moon Geun Young), is also dead (her presence fabricated by 
Su-mi) and the cause of her death is stranger still, with all the females of 
the family involved: the mother, who hanged herself in a closet (seem-
ingly) and whose lifeless body fell on Su-yeon, fatally crushing her; the 
stepmother, who (apparently) saw this incident but failed to intervene; 
and Su-mi herself, who did not hear her sister’s cries and could not con-
sequently save her. While the stepmother seems to be unfairly maligned 
up until this ‘revelation’, the suggestion that she dismissed Su-yeon’s 
plight makes us think again. Did the mother really commit suicide, or 
did the stepmother do away with her rival and subsequently allow her 
daughter to die? Given the fact that Su-mi was in the garden during this 
incident, we cannot be sure that her stepmother was there herself and 
realise our only certainty is that a beloved sister died and that a mixture 
of guilt and transference are used by the surviving sibling to deal with 
this loss. The stepdaughter is shown to be an unreliable witness, grant-
ing the ‘wicked’ stepmother a rare reprieve, in similar fashion to 
Snow 
White: A Tale of Terror
(Michael Cohn, 1996), as we are invited to reas-
sess our assumptions. The stepmother is beautiful, chic and obviously 
resented by Su-mi, who seeks to usurp her role, arranging her father’s 
underwear and stroking his face at night, lending a Freudian subtext to 
Su-mi’s underlying ‘issues’ and causing us to wonder if she was respon-
sible for her mother’s death. Intriguingly enigmatic, the film interest-
ingly questions the hoary trope of maternal monstrosity, granting the 
stepmother considerable sympathy not only in having to face Su-mi’s 
relentless hostility, but in the fact that she is also haunted by the house 
and its unhappy spirits, taking daily medication administered by her 
distant husband.
Aligning