In the eight years since its original release Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) has established its status as a classic of Korean cinema. It’s been remade by Hollywood as The Uninivited (Charles Guard, Thomas Guard, USA: 2009) and its director has consistently delivered crowd-pleasing projects within various film genres. Rewatching the film today outside of the popular J-horror environment that greeted its original release, A Tale of Two Sisters has lost none of its original power and holds up as a stunningly beautiful, meticulously constructed and effectively disturbing tale.Reviewed on the site a good while ago, the film was quite rightly praised:
“Merging horror and drama – and treating each with a gentle touch rather than succumbing to the temptation to be more aggressive – A TALE OF TWO SISTERS is a delicate balancing act of stunning visuals, impressive performances and intelligent writing. Slow paced in the best way possible, it’s a film that unwinds carefully and on the surface has only a few typical ‘horror’ moments. The type of film that requires concentration throughout, A TALE OF TWO SISTERS stays in the mind for a long time after viewing.” Read the full review here
Back in 2004 UK distributor Tartan gave A Tale of Two Sisters a pretty exhaustive 2-disc DVD release, so we took a look at the films subsequent treatment on blu-ray from Palisades Tartan, check out the review below…
UK Blu-ray Review
With its stunning visuals A Tale of Two Sisters is a film that fully deserves to be given the blu-ray treatment. With a bright, colourful palette and some beautiful cinematography, it’s an absolute feast of images, composition and movement. Let’s skip right to important part of this review and say that unfortunately this blu-ray transfer just does not give the film the detail that it deserves. Now let’s just clarify that statement: there were few complaints about the original UK DVD release of A Tale of Two Sisters and to be fair the blu-ray release does provide a minor improvement on the quality of the image on a very large screen. With plenty of scenes utilising darkness and shadows, this UK blu-ray transfer provides stronger blacks and gives the feel of a deeper image than the previous DVD, however its a relatively soft transfer and given a very large screen to view it on there’s just not the detail that you would expect to see. While it would be unfair to call this a bad transfer, if you compare it to the recent Palisades Tartan blu-ray release of I’m A Cyborg, a stunning transfer which provides the level of detail that you can expect from the format then A Tale of Two Sisters feels like a real disappointment. Things improve with the sound options – there’s the choice of DTS-HD Master Audio or a Dolby True HD soundtrack. I won’t pretend to understand the technicalities of these but they’re suitably atmospheric surround mixes.
Given the extras-packed original 2-disc DVD release (which included commentaries, deleted scenes, trailers and interviews) its disappointing to find the sole special feature here is a twenty-four minute ‘Behind The Scenes’ montage consisting of footage showing the making of the film with the occassional soundbite from the cast and director. It’s not terribly interesting and the quality is understandably in standard definition but also quite poor.
If you’ve yet to catch A Tale of Two Sisters then the blu-ray release may be worth considering if you’re just after the film itself, however don’t expect great things from the image because it’s sadly lacking and if you’re a fan of special features then you really need to hunt down a copy of the original release. Here’s hoping that A Tale of Two Sisters is a title that Palisades Tartan decide to re-release at some point in the future as there’s plenty to improve on here.
