Good horror movies usually need a substantial amount of conviction for making themselves work, and South Korean horror film “Exhuma” has plenty of that. While I do not believe much of what its main characters talk about, the movie did a competent job of intriguing and then scaring us, and that is fairly enough for compensating for a number of weak aspects including its rather convoluted plot which feels a little too preposterous at times.

The movie opens with two young shamans heading to LA for their latest job to handle. Some very rich Korean family living there is having an inexplicable family problem which may be associated with some bad spirit, and Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) soon come to conclude that their client and his family’s ongoing trouble is caused by the ghost of a certain dead family member, who has incidentally been buried in some remote rural spot in South Korea. All they will have to do next is digging up the grave of that dead family member in question, and they are going to hold a ritual for appeasing the ghost for the peace for not only the ghost but also the client and his family.

For this grave-digging ritual, Hwa-rim recruits Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik), a well-experienced “geomancer” who knows a lot about how to choose auspicious places for graves and buildings. While he is not particularly interested in accepting Hwa-rim’s request at first, Sang-deok eventually agrees to do the job for Hwa-rim, and he soon comes to that grave spot in question along with his undertaker friend/colleague Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin), who will handle the whole process of digging the grave for Sang-deok and Hwa-rim.

Of course, it does not take much time for Sang-deok and Hwa-rim to sense that something is not so right about that grave and its surrounding area. While it seems to be at a fairly good spot, it has several very suspicious signs including its rather odd tombstone, and, above all, the client and his family do not seem to tell everything about that dead family member from the beginning.

This makes their job feel much riskier than before, but Sang-deok and his colleagues begin to work on their grave-digging job mainly because they will get paid a lot for their service, and director/writer Jang Jae-hyun, who previously directed “The Priests” (2015) and “Svaha: The Sixth Finger” (2019), gradually builds up more ominous tension on the screen. Around the point where Hwa-rim performs an exorcism ritual for protecting several hired gravediggers from whatever is associated with the grave, the movie pulls all the stops for more tension and spookiness, and you may be unnerved by some bloody details involved with Hwa-rim’s exorcism ritual (Note: No animal was harmed or harassed during the shooting of this film).

Around that narrative point, Jang’s screenplay takes an unexpected plot turn as its main characters belatedly discover that there was actually more than the coffin of that dead family member below the grave. This will probably sound quite outrageous for some of you, but I was rather amused by that, and the movie is willing to go further with that for more moments of horror and dread. When its main characters happen to spend a night at a small nearby temple along with their unexpected discovery, we clearly see a bad sign right from the beginning, and the movie does not disappoint us at all with an effectively disturbing sequence which eventually reveals an unspeakable secret hidden below that grave.

As its main characters try to deal with their utterly serious situation, the movie has many supernatural elements to be explained to us here and there, and that is where it becomes a bit too shaky to engage us. Even during the climactic part which is a little too long in my humble opinion, the movie still has some more stuffs to explain, and that hurts to some degree what has been steadily built up to that point.

Nevertheless, the movie still works thanks to its strong conviction in the story and characters, and its four main cast members play their broad archetype characters as straight as demanded. As one of the most notable South Korean actors during last two decades, Choi Min-sik surely draws your attention first, and he reminds us that he is still as charismatic as he was in a number of well-known South Korean films including Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” (2003). Kim Go-eun, who made an impressive debut in Jung Ji-woo’s “A Muse” (2012), is unflappable as a strong-willed shaman determined to get the job done to the end, and she is especially good when her character must take a huge risk alone by herself later in the story. Lee Do-hyun is also solid as Hwa-rim’s dependable partner, and Yoo Hae-jin, an ever-reliable character actor who can easily switch back and forth between drama and comedy, provides occasional small moments of humor to the story as required.

In conclusion, “Exhuma”, which will be one of the major local box office successes of this year considering its satisfying current result at this point, is entirely without flaws, but it still works well on the whole thanks to its good direction and the commendable efforts from its several main cast members. To be frank with you, I still do not give a damn about all those mumbo-jumbos about geomancy just like I do not care much about exorcism, but the movie held my attention enough to make me go along with a number of good scary moments, so I will not grumble for now.