It's always refreshing to see horror films that aren't based around the Christian frame work because everyone is influenced by the same Hollywood movies and western colonization. It's an even more impressive feat considering the director himself is Christian also. I really enjoy that the film is rooted in cultural knowledge that specifically the Korean audiences would be familiar with and doesn't do any exposition to handhold international audiences, because it doesn't have to. I see so many reviews that are so entitled to being catered to. There's a lot of cross cultural motifs in the film perhaps alluding to the past unease of forced mixing of cultures during the wartime versus the modern world where there are cultural exchanges through globalization with various soft powers. The cursed rich family hiring the shaman are Korean American, their ancestor unfortunately worked with the colonial Japanese military, and the geomancer's daughter marrying a German husband, even the Christian character Young Geun who assists in the geomancy and the shamanic rituals and does Christian prayers for his cohort who had been attacked by a Japanese curse demon.

The film opens with the shaman Hwa Rim being spoke to in Japanese by an Asian flight attendant on a flight of different ethnicities sitting around them. While Hwa Rim responds to the attendant's question in perfect Japanese, she also clarifies that she's Korean. Her cultural identity is important to her. She and her shaman assistant Bong Gil travel to St. Joseph's hospital to assess baby Joseph who is the latest first born son or remaining son afflicted of the family curse. St. Joseph is the earth father of Jesus, so Joseph carries the theme of the patrilineage. Hwa Rim clocks that the troubles stem from the grandfather who the characters later discovered the big family secret is that he was a high ranking officer who worked for the Colonial Japanese during that era, which is how recent it still is in the historical timeframe. Aside from weapons and atrocities, there was Japanization to force Koreans to remove their culture. The iron stakes refers to an urban legend that the Colonial Japanese installed them in specific places to break the spirit of the Korean people. No matter how loyal the grandfather was to the occupiers, they used him even in death for their scheme to protect the giant demon version of the iron stake made from a big sword and different pieces of bodies. His nameless, abandoned grave, turning him into an aggressive spirt that murders his own bloodline. The sparing visions of the ghost was more effective than dancing his tango loving daughter in law to death which was pretty silly. The ghost learned human technology really fast, using the phone to fool his grandson into ignoring the actual Sang Deok at the door. That's kind of silly, but points for flipping the script on the door banging being from the actual Sang Deok. They make sure to show that they had no choice, but to cremate the body on a rainy day to save baby Joseph, and so the guy who worked for the Japanese Colonial power will not have a good afterlife.

The cgi foxes could have been done better, but the human headed snake that screams was an effective creepy design, as was the reveal there is a vertical grave underneath the grandfather, and the giant demon shogun that feasts on humans that emerges from it. It was clever to have Geomancer Sang Deok's explanation about how his field revolves around the elements of wood, metal, fire, air, and water come back around by using wood and his own blood in place of water to defeat the monster comprised of metal and fire. Hwa Rim's fluent Japanese implied to be possibly related to her shamanism field requiring at least some knowledge of the shamanism from there with Japanese ghosts behaving differently on the danger scale, comes in clutch to understand what the shogun says and wants. Bong Gil manages to survive his encounter with the shogun by being covered mostly in tattoos of the Buddhist script, leaving the demon only being able to stab the liver area which was an unfortunate blank spot. Hwa Rim realizing this leads to a funny scene where she, Sang Deok, and Young Geun are covered in temporary tattoos of the Buddhist script while having to speak to the traffic controller at a stop to go back into the mountain area. The rag tag team defeat the evil, but they are still are still affected by their experiences, similar to how South Korean is still affected by what had happened to the country during the colonial rule. The team is bonded though surviving the trauma and Sang Deok incorporates them into his new blended family along with his German son in law in the the big family photo.