‘The Second Child’ review: Lim Soo-jung stars in atmospheric South Korean horror-tinged mystery

Dir/scr: Yu Eun-jeong. South Korea. 2025. 101mins

A psychologist and single mother learns the shameful truth behind the death of her older daughter and her evident reappearance three years later – and how both those events could have a potentially fatal impact on her younger child. Writer-director Yu Euon-jeong’s second feature, The Second Child is a partially-realised horror mystery that is frequently rich on atmosphere but thin on thematic coherence and genuine frights.

 Carried along by strong turns from its cast

Deliberately paced and practically free of gory violence, The Second Child sees Yu – one of South Korea’s few female filmmakers – playing with genre expectation the way she did in her debut, 2018’s Ghost Walk, to slightly more conventional but equally uneven ends. Comparisons could be drawn with the likes of The Slender Man, The Babadook and Kim Jee-won’s A Tale Of Two Sisters; particularly as Sisters star Lim Soo-jung appears here (and also serves as a producer). That association with Kim’s Korean wave hit, and the general popularity of genre films, should take The Second Child a fair way, particularly with specialty festivals, and a general release in Asia is a strong possibility.

Just as Ghost Walk put a creative spin on genre and was underpinned by a revelatory performance from Han Hae-in, the less cryptic and more accessible The Second Child is also carried along by strong turns from its cast; particularly Park So-yi (Switch) and Yu Na (Dark Nuns) as the film’s central sisters. Su-ryeon (Yu Na) and Su-an (Park) are close as sisters go, particularly given their age gap: Su-ryeon is in middle school and Su-an just 10 years old. Sneaking into her room one night, Su-an asks Su-ryeon to tell her the story of the Shadow, a creature living in the underworld who yearns to be corporeal. The catch is that he needs two children to help him, so one can give up their body.

The story seems to come true that same night, culminating in Su-an trying – and failing – to prevent Su-ryeon from falling to her death from the roof. When Su-an wakes from a coma three years later (she was found on the ground beside her sister) mum Geum-ok (Lim) is relieved, but also stressed about how to break the news of Su-ryeon’s death.

Su-an, who still thinks she’s 10, readjusts to life as best she can, catching up on her education at cram schools when she meets Jae-in (Yu again) – a dead ringer for Su-ryeon. They strike up a tenuous friendship although, for her part, Su-an is convinced that Jae-in will bring her sister back as long as she can lure her to the house where Su-ryeon died.

Spoilers aside, One of The Second Child’s modest pleasures comes from watching the girls and Geum-ok slowly unravel the mystery of a family curse (which is slightly opaque) that goes back several generations and applies only to women. Yu takes her time building out the puzzle at the heart of the story and lets Park and Yu Na really live in the characters; it’s as much a story of childhood friendship as anything else.

Ultimately, however, The Second Child only flirts with its horror trappings, instead emerging as a slow-burning meditation on concepts of parenting, inherited trauma and alternative lives. The three female characters frequently wonder if the existence of the underworld means there are better options for them, and the story’s only men are antagonists. Yet while cinematographer Lee Ju-hwan crafts some striking images, the ideas with which Yu is wrestling never truly crystallise.