Exhuma

• Made for roughly US$11 million, it grossed about US$93.9 million worldwide and drew 11.91 million domestic admissions, becoming the 23rd Korean film and the first occult film ever to clear 10 million admissions in Korea.
• It premiered in the Forum section of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival on February 16, 2024, before opening wide in Korea on February 22, 2024.
• Every lead is named after a real Korean independence activist: Choi Min-sik's geomancer Kim Sang-deok, Lee Do-hyun's Bong-gil (after assassin Yun Bong-gil), Yoo Hae-jin's Yeong-geun, and Kim Go-eun's Hwa-rim. The characters' vehicle plates carry numbers 0301, 0815, and 1945 - all anti-colonial markers (March 1st Movement, Liberation Day, year of independence).
• Practicing shamans Lee Da-young and Gochunja consulted on set and performed real protective rituals with mantras and candles to keep the production clean; Kim Go-eun prepared for the daesal gut scenes and recited a 30-to-40-minute Gyeongmun prayer before filming her ritual scenes.
• It is the third film in Jang Jae-hyun's loose occult trilogy, following The Priests (2015) and Svaha: The Sixth Finger (2019), and Jang wrote all three screenplays himself.
• The story snaps in half on purpose: the front is a feng-shui grave-curse mystery, the back becomes a creature feature once a second upright coffin reveals a Japanese samurai turned oni and the colonial iron-stake myth takes over.

The whole film is one long act of national exorcism dressed as folk horror. The iron stake hammered into the mountain is the on-screen version of the real occupation-era myth that Japan drove spikes into Korea's geomantic spine, and the team digging it out, all named for independence fighters, are literally un-burying colonial trauma so the land can heal.

The split structure isn't a bug, it's the argument. The first hour treats the curse as a family's private inheritance problem; the second hour reveals the real wound is collective and historical. Jang is saying you can't geomancer your way out of a wound a whole country took, only confront the thing that was buried to keep you sick.

Sang-deok the geomancer is the film's quiet skeptic-turned-believer arc. He reads land for money at the start and ends up risking his life on a metaphysical war he can't fully see, which tracks the film's bet that the rational, modern Korea still has to settle accounts with what its grandparents' generation had stamped into the dirt.

A wealthy Korean American family hires a young shaman duo to chase a curse rotting their bloodline, and the trail leads to a forbidden grave on a mountain nobody will touch. The shamans pull in a sharp-eyed geomancer and a quiet mortician, and the dig goes wrong fast. What crawls out of the first coffin is only the warm-up. Beneath it waits something the Japanese buried on purpose, an iron spine driven into the country's back, and the team has to read the land's wounds before the thing underneath finishes what colonial sorcerers started.