Exhuma (2024)

Renowned Korean shaman Hwa-rim and her protégé, Bong-gil, are hired by a wealthy Korean American real estate developer family to investigate the mysterious illness afflicting their newborn son. Hwa-rim identifies the cause as a “Grave’s Call”, a vengeful ancestor's spirit haunting the family. The patriarch, Park Ji-yong, asks them to relocate his grandfather’s grave. Hwa-rim recruits feng shui master and geomancer Kim Sang-deok and mortician Yeong-geun, promising them 500,000 USD, which particularly appeals to Sang-deok because he needs money for his daughter’s wedding.

Sang-deok, who specialises in selling burial sites to wealthy clients, becomes suspicious when Ji-yong insists on cremating the grave, located on a remote mountain near the North Korean border. He initially refuses, sensing sinister energy, but agrees after Ji-yong doubles the payment. Hwa-rim assures the group that she can perform a ritual during the excavation to prevent the curse. Ji-yong explains that a famous monk, ‘Gisune’, had revealed the grave’s location to deter grave robbers.

Hwa-rim and Bong-gil perform the ritual as the grave is excavated. The work proceeds smoothly until a gravedigger accidentally decapitates a human-headed snake, producing a bad omen and bringing rain. Yeong-geun decides to wait before cremating the coffin, storing it at a nearby ward. The local custodian, having heard rumours of treasure, opens the coffin and releases Ji-yong’s grandfather, a vengeful spirit who kills Ji-yong’s parents and Ji-yong himself. The grandfather, revealed to have been a collaborator with Imperial Japan during the colonial period, is tormented by his improper burial. Sang-deok cremates the coffin before the spirit can kill the baby, ending the curse.

Months later, Yeong-geun tells Sang-deok that a gravedigger has been disturbed since killing the snake. Returning to the site, Sang-deok finds the snake’s head and a second burial site containing a seven-foot-long standing coffin. He summons Hwa-rim, Bong-gil and Yeong-geun to help dispose of it. After excavating the coffin, they rest at a temple, where Hwa-rim learns that Gisune was actually the powerful Japanese shaman Murayama Junji, known as The Fox.

That night, Bong-gil witnesses an oni killing the temple priest, a pig farmer and his pigs. Hwa-rim and Bong-gil discover that the coffin has been torn open from within, and Hwa-rim is attacked by the oni, a samurai who died at the Battle of Sekigahara and was originally enshrined in Japan before being transferred to Korea. Bong-gil is injured and possessed, while the others see the oni transform into a ball of fire and return to the mountain.

Using Bong-gil's possession to investigate the oni’s origins, Hwa-rim learns that, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, Imperial Japan ordered its shamans to bury large iron spiritual spikes across the country to disrupt its life force and facilitate colonial rule. Sang-deok discovers that the supposed grave robbers were Korean patriots trying to remove these spikes, and that the samurai oni was the guardian spirit protecting one of them.

Sang-deok, Hwa-rim and Yeong-geun plan to excavate the relic after the creature rises at midnight, with Hwa-rim distracting the samurai while the others dig. A vision reveals The Fox embedding a katana inside a decapitated samurai’s body, transforming him into a tsukumogami, while Ji-yong’s grandfather’s grave conceals the relic. Sang-deok realises that the samurai itself is the iron spike and, because it represents fire in feng shui, must be defeated with water and wood. He uses a wooden pickaxe soaked in his own blood to destroy the samurai spirit. Although badly injured and rendered unconscious, Sang-deok later awakens in hospital with the others at his bedside. Months later, the group attends his daughter’s wedding.