2004: Cul de sac in Minneapolis, February, four p.m., already dark, Craftsman-style bungalow, strangely narrow living room. I am reviewing a Tartan Asia Extreme video while the pale screen of my television illuminates my ghastly but gradual transition from young 'n’ hip to old 'n’ poor when the phone rings -- my family, calling to wish me a happy forty-third birthday which is, oddly, on the same day as my mother's. My mother, sisters and their kids are all in the Caribbean for a family celebration to which I could not afford the ticket. My husband/Registered Nurse politely takes a message and then endures my howling imprecations against my fate, family and fortune.

An eccentric scene, but not unheard of: in America people often sit in front of their TVs a thousand miles away from their "families of origin" and phone calls are second only to emails in terms of instant miscommunication. What happened to the notion of family, to honor and obligation? Modern "blended" families sometimes feel like a bunch of uneasy strangers moving around the world piece by piece, sending each other ambiguous messages of guilt or indifference, always ready to choose a new spouse or the next batch of kids. Everybody lives five thousand miles away from every one else. Here I am middle-aged, I moan, and my 70-year-old mother goes to more cocktail parties than I ever did. Who does my mother live near and whose mortgages does she pay? Her stepdaughters. While I, her real daughter, sit in cramped and darkened exile, worrying about the heating bill. Filial piety – promising to love and respect my mother – was never offered as an option and I'd be filial all right, if I wasn't so stressed out about money all the time, etc. in a stream of self-pity.

Calm down. My husband soothes his way into my monologue, Watch this film. It's about a family with some real problems. He titrates the methadone/chocolate milk/ I.V. drip to which I am permanently attached and slips in Korean director Kim Ju Won's Tale of Two Sisters. Two hours later, I call my mother to beg forgiveness.

Tale of Two Sisters may not affect everyone like this but it's based on a fairy tale, and fairy tales often communicate universally. The Korean folktale “Rose Flower, Red Lotus,” the source of film, is grimmer than a lot of modern day horror flicks. At one point, a boy is instructed by his mother to place a crushed rat in a sleeping girl's bed, intended as an impostor aborted fetus to impugn the girl’s chastity. The stepmother in the story makes Snow White's seem like a doting icon of maternity. In Kim’s 2003 film adaptation, he jettisons the rat, delivering instead a young girl gnawed by another kind of beast. The film's short prologue consists of a shot of a young girl’s face as she's asked--by an unseen male authority figure-- "Who are You?" The rest of the film constitutes her tragic answer.

In the film’s opening, Su-mi (“Rose” in the original story) and her sister Su-yeon (“Lotus”) arrive home to a large, gated house in the woods. They emerge from a black car, two girls on the cusp of adolescence, dressed in child-like clothes. Rose is all in red, reminding western audiences of Riding Hood, and there is something fierce and self-contained about the way she links hands with her soft, pale sister. "I'll protect you," she later swears to her as they lie on a floating dock at a pond, surrounded by the cluttered, clasping trees. Afterwards they enter the family home and stepmother Eun-joo, emerges from shadow like a pale moon, all tight smile and bright, brittle chatter. Played by actress Jeong-ah Yeom, she's so razor-thin her collarbone should get it's own screen credit, and she seems as haunted as the darkness surrounding her.

Darkness in fact, is the first and foremost element in this family home. The only thing filmed in light are the two girls, and the contrast is instantly unnerving. The air crackles with barely supressed rage and free-floating anxiety. Su-mi is the one coming home from the mental hospital but it's stepmom who takes the pills for melancholy that her deflated husband provides. When she tries to slip in bed with him, he wordlessly retires to the couch. Later, her show-stopping meltdown at a dinner party at first seems inexplicable until, as we understand more, her actions make shocking, subconscious sense.