The Hut: Ferocity, Thy Name Is Woman

Life in the small town of Suri is pretty wretched for the womenfolk at the end of the Chosun dynasty. At least, it is if director Lee Doo-yong's supernatural flick The Hut is to be believed. On the one end, there's rape; on the other, an enforced chastity so maddening that widows are driven to self-flagellate, take hot irons to their flesh, and drive a knife savagely into the nether regions then let the wounds fester. Sex positive, Suri is not. And yet, rather than call for a feminist revolution, all the townspeople are obsessed with that one male heir (Choi Seong-ho) who's been in a coma and may be possessed by a local spirit who's holding a justifiably major grudge.

And so they — ironically — call in a female shaman named (Yu Ji-in) who, in order to perform the necessary exorcism to free the town's heir presumptive, needs to play detective and findout who this infuriated phantom might be. Waving a shaking stick will only take a spirit-purging process so far! So... Is it the late Sam-dol (Won Namkoong), a local halfwit who lived in a ramshackle cabin that once served as a holding place for bodies in transition from this life to the next? Or is it the young woman to whom Sam-dol was pimped out because the family matriarch (Hwang Jung-seun) mistakenly thought her charge was about to die, sexually unfulfilled? Whoever the ghost is has every right to be pissed because they've spent a generation captured in a piece of paper trapped inside a bottle that was sealed inside another airtight vessel and then buried underground.