Two weeks ago, I finally saw The Uninvited. I'd rewatched the wonderful original A Tale of Two Sisters a few weeks before, and went into the movie fully intending to make fun of it throughout and get a good laugh for my money, if nothing else. The last remake of an Asian horror film I saw in theatres (at the same theatre, actually) was Shutter, a remake of a Thai film of the same name I have not seen, and that was definitely a laugh fest for me. An American remake of one of my all time favourite movies? I had no doubt in my mind that I would hate it, but be entertained by its crappiness at the very least.
What I got wasn't quite what I'd expected, but it was even more maddening.
The thing is, I was expecting to hate this movie all the way through. Instead, I found that it actually wasn't so bad once it got going, and after awhile I stopped comparing it to the original in my head and started just watching it for the movie it is, not the movie it's based on. But because I began to almost enjoy it, I became at least a little invested in the characters - and the movie itself - and as a result, I was royally pissed off when the movie took a turn for the worse at the ending.
SPOILERS AHEAD, BEWARE! My main problem with The Uninvited is that they completely butchered Su-mi's character, portrayed here by Emily Browning as Anna. In the original, Su-mi's assumed guilt stems from the fact that she stormed out of the house, angry with her stepmother, while Su-yeon, her younger sister, was dying, trapped underneath the fallen closet containing their mother's newly dead body; she was unable to save Su-yeon. The initial death of the other sister in The Uninvited, Alex, wouldn't be so bad on its own: she and their mother were both killed by an accident caused by Anna, while Anna had not meant to kill either of them.
While it can be assumed that both characters harbour guilt for their sisters' deaths, the implications of these deaths (and the respective stepmothers' involvements in them) are very different. Su-mi stormed out of the house after having an argument with the stepmother character, who knew that Su-yeon was dying at that exact moment and didn't do a thing to help her, or tell anybody. Anna's hatred of her stepmother character caused her sister's death in a far different way. Upon discovering her father and the stepmother character - who is the sick mother's nurse in both movies - about to have sex while the mother is bedridden in the boathouse, Anna goes down to the boathouse and fills a watering can with gas, and begins to carry it towards the house. It is dripping gas from the tap reaching a lamp that Anna accidentally knocks over on her way out that causes the boathouse to explode, killing both Alex and their mother. So while Su-mi's only intention at that moment was to get out of the house and away from her stepmother character for awhile, Anna's intention was far different: it would appear that she intended to set fire to her own house with the gas, killing her father and, more importantly, her stepmother character.
This means that while Su-mi was perfectly innocent, a girl who couldn't save her sister simply because she didn't know that she was dying, Anna was far from innocent, inadvertently causing her sister's and mother's deaths while on her way to kill her father and stepmother-to-be! And it gets worse. While Su-mi remains innocent throughout all of the events of A Tale of Two Sisters, not once causing harm to anybody but herself, Anna goes on to kill both her boyfriend, who saw what happened on the night of the fire, and her stepmother character Rachel - who in this movie, is completely innocent!
And that's another problem I have with the changes in the characters - the stepmother being innocent. In the original, Eun-joo allows Su-yeon to die, effectively killing her though she did not initiate the closet's falling on top of her. This makes her far from innocent. In The Uninvited, the only less than savoury thing Rachel has done is hook up with the dad while the mother is still alive. Not a great thing to do, but these things happen. She's hardly the evil stepmother based on that alone, because she hasn't maliciously hurt anyone. Both girls hate the stepmothers for infiltrating their families, a very common occurence in family drama, but while Su-mi simply angsts at her and paints her as a murderer in her head once she's gone crazy, Anna takes it to the point of murder. For an affair when the mother is already dying anyway? That's just fucked up. Both stepmothers are punished in the end - Rachel is stabbed and killed by Anna, while Eun-joo gets owned by a ghost - Eun-joo is the only one who actually deserved it.
Obviously, I'm very mad about these changes. Su-mi's story is tragic because none of it was her fault, but still she lost her beloved mother and sister, and she lost her mind. Anna accidentally kills her mother and sister while aiming to kill her father and stepmother - unless she's getting that gas while damn angry at the two of them for some other reason, in which case, do enlighten me - and then kills two more innocent people, and she too has gone crazy. The entire story of The Uninvited can be explained by the fact that Anna's crazy, and enough so to kill people for crazy reasons. The way she acts completely changes at the end of the movie, and she suddenly begins to act like an evil crazy girl instead of the innocent victim she was for the rest of the movie. That's not so much tragic as just...a psychotic kinda-thriller. A psychotic thriller sounds good in theory, but not this one. Compared to a psychological horror tragedy? No. We can't even get too upset about the death of the innocent Rachel, because she was portrayed as evil for the entire movie, and while we understand that the majority of Eun-joo's screentime in AToTS was invented in Su-mi's head, we have no idea what was real and what wasn't in The Uninvited, so it turns out that we never really knew Rachel's character at all. Even when it comes to the people we do feel bad for, the tragic effect just isn't strong enough, where as it was played out beautifully in AToTS.
Now for the other problems I had with this movie. For one, instead of taking the initial ending twist - the sister actually being dead and the main character playing out all of these events in her mind - and making it as brilliant as it was in the original, they used that twist, didn't even explain it well enough for everything to make sense (ie. how Rachel was really acting this whole time), and then threw in another, pointless twist: the person Anna had been saying she suspected Rachel to really be actually being the person who Anna had spoken to during her time in the mental hospital, who we saw briefly at the beginning of the movie. The creepy dead children? They were murdered by that woman in the mental hospital, and have absolutely nothing to do with what actually happened to Anna's family. They only served to be a part of Anna's pseudo-justifications of her actions towards the stepmother, ideas that had stuck in her head after hearing about them from her fellow patient. They are completely irrelevant to the entire storyline. A Tale of Two Sisters didn't need such a contrived plot device to make its premise work; but of course, its main character was a tragic figure, not a crazy murderer. They didn't need any pseudo-justifications there.
And of course, the supernatural elements. The events of the original movie were a combination of fabrications in Su-mi's head and actual supernatural elements. While we don't know if Su-mi really saw her mother's ghost climb onto her bed, Eun-joo got owned by a ghost at the end of the movie, and she wasn't crazy (just evil). The aunt having a seizure and seeing a girl in a green dress under the sink? Inferring that the dinner scene really happened as we saw it, but Eun-joo was actually Su-mi, hence the other family members' reactions to her story, and having seen the family picture in which Su-yeon is wearing the same green dress, we can infer that Su-yeon's ghost was, indeed, there. There are many different conclusions we can come to, but I choose to believe that both the mother's and Su-yeon's ghosts were, indeed, haunting the house. I think it's plausible that it was the mother's ghost that attacked Eun-joo in the end, avenging her daughter's death. Now, where were the supernatural elements in The Uninvited? The creepy scene with the boyfriend in Anna's bedroom obviously didn't really happen, since Anna killed him at the lake, and the creepy children had nothing to do with Anna's situation and thus wouldn't have tried to reach her, so all we have to go on is her seeing her mother's ghost in the boathouse, which may or may not have really happened. But with the way everything gets explained at the end, it would seem that we are to assume that everything in the movie is explained by Anna's craziness, so it probably didn't happen. The Uninvited really isn't a horror movie at all in the sense that AToTS was, but more of a thriller, which makes sense given its producers having also done Disturbia...but still. The fact that there were still actual supernatural elements there was part of what made AToTS awesome.
Another change made in this movie was the ages of the sisters. Anna played the Su-mi character, though Su-mi was the older sister in AToTS and Anna was the younger sister in this. But Anna took on aspects of both Su-mi's and Su-yeon's characters, to some extent - she was the younger sister who wanted her older sister to stay in bed with her at night, and she had the scene where she lay in bed watching the door to her room open, terrified - and so, Alex was a whole new character, not like either Su-mi or Su-yeon from the original, but a drinking, teenage partying, but decent enough person who just happened to be the sister; really, a throwaway character. What a disappointment, compared to how much we care for both of the sisters in the original film.
Speaking of the dead sister, something cool you're supposed to notice once you find out that she's dead is that while the stepmother addressed her directly several times - because she was just a figment of Su-mi's imagination, too - the father never spoke to her, and in scenes when he was with both daughters, he would only talk to Su-mi. This is because Su-yeon was never really there. But in The Uninvited, we see Alex talking to the dad! While I don't remember him really acknowledging her in that scene - it was just briefly viewed from outside a window by Anna - that still ruined the effect for me. Just as the dad never spoke to Su-yeon in the original, Su-yeon was never seen speaking to him, either.
Now, I could complain about The Uninvited only showing Anna returning home from the mental hospital while both sisters stepped out of that car at the beginning of the original, but I don't actually believe that that's a very important detail. Either way makes sense; in the original, Su-mi simply believes that she's been with her sister this whole time, while in The Uninvited, Anna's solitary stay at the mental hospital is portrayed as is, but she believes that her sister is there when she gets home. It doesn't make much of a difference.
The one thing I do have left to complain about is the way in which the mother died. In both movies, the mothers were sick, the stepmothers being their nurses, and the sisters' deaths were accidents (though Su-yeon could have been saved by the stepmother). But in A Tale of Two Sisters, the mother killed herself, and right there in her daughter's closet while Su-yeon was sleeping mere feet away, no less. Su-yeon's accident was caused by her by mistake upon discovering her mother's hanging body. One could go so far as to say that this makes the mother slightly less than innocent, for killing herself in a way that would be so traumatizing to her daughter and for that suicide indirectly causing her daughter's death; at the very least, it makes the entire situation more tragic. Anna's mother simply dies in an accident caused by Anna, with Alex also present in the boathouse when it explodes. It just doesn't come across as tragically as the events of AToTS, and it's far more simple. It's a perfect example of the original movie's complexity being simplified and dumbed down for American audiences (and if we're never challenged with intelligent, confusing movies in North America, then what good is our film industry?).
The Uninvited showed potential at first, but the ending absolutely killed it, and I was so thoroughly dissatisfied after it finished that I grew more and more angry about it on the way home from the theatre, until I got to the point where I just had to forget about the movie for a few days because it pissed me off too much. As a fan of the original, I would have been less disappointed if the movie had been crap throughout, because at least then I wouldn't have been led to believe that it was a decent movie and then been disappointed by the ending. Instead of getting to laugh at a crap remake, I was let down by a crap remake that held a small promise of potential that was never followed through on. I didn't get to laugh; I just got mad.
The moral of the story: if an Asian horror remake looks like crap in the trailers, it probably is crap, even if it starts to seem okay for awhile while you're watching it. I'll try to remember that and actually get that good laugh for my money the next time a movie like this rolls around.
The Uninvited...to my DVD collection.
