This Freudian fairy tale from South Korea reworks the Grimm brothers’ story for adults. An anxious businessman driving through the countryside to visit his dying mother hears on his mobile phone that his lover is pregnant. He skids off the road and is escorted by a child through a dark forest to a magical house, seemingly arrested in a preadolescent state of desire and dependence. Adults appear to threaten children. It is apparent, however, that the three children who dominate the place are destroying a succession of surrogate parents. In this dense, frightening, superbly designed film, rites of passage are disguised as nightmares. It is terrain illuminatingly explored by Bruno Bettelheim and Marina Warner, with whose writings the director is almost certainly acquainted.

Phillip French, The Observer