“Exhuma” is a somewhat lumbering South Korean thriller about ghosts, how they can disturb the tranquility of the families that descended from them and the professionals hired to help remedy such problems and remove such troublesome spirits.

It’s got lighter moments, but it’s no “Ghostbusters.” The film is also about Korea’s uneasy relationship with its past tormentor, Japan, creating afterlife issues that can dog the Korean diaspora in America, thousands of miles removed from the Korean peninsula.

I have no gripe with Jae-hyun Jang’s film’s modest effects, which get the job done. But the paucity of “thrills” and frights, many of them consigned to that “reckoning with Japan” and Japanese ghosts (which are “different”) in a third act that takes forever to show up water down the tale’s impact make one wish for one last vigorous edit.

A young couple that isn’t really a “couple” travels to America to visit a hospital and consult with a concerned family there. Their newborn baby isn’t laughing or responding to stimuli, and they figure it has to do with their ancestors.

The newly-flown-in Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) hears of the history of their family and agrees. “First borns” of every generation of this clan face this. She and her assistant Bong Gil (Lee Do-hyun) try a couple of folk medicine things and recommend more drastic measures that must be taken up back in Korea.

“Shadows” hang over your baby, “pressing down from your ancestors.”

Hwa-rim is a shaman, one who exists “between” the living and the dead, she narrates. She knows her business. With assistant Bong Gil, she will oversee exhumatations. She will dance (more K-Pop and Britney than “traditional” seeming, but maybe that’s just me) and he will chant and play the drums as old graves are reopened and the uneasy dead are dealt with.

To do that, they’ll need a geomancer, a wizened expert in grave sites, soil and whether or not an interred soul has reasons to complain about their accomodations.

Hwa-rim might say a prayer over a grave. Geomancer Kim Sang Deok (Choi Min-sik) will taste the soil, and when his accomplice Mr. Ko (Yoo Hae-jin), a funeral home director, has arranged for the grave to be opened, Kim will climb into it and make an assessment.

“Bloodlines,” Kim intones (in Korean with English subtitles). “You can’t escape them, even in death.”

What follows is a long, convoluted discussion of this one family’s history, who married into it, a mountainside grave that must be located and studied and a bit of joking — when the client’s not around — among these seasoned professionals about their billable hours.

The tale breaks down into chapters, which may help screenwriters organize their dramatic beats but rarely add anything to a finished film.

There are jokes, here and there. An old man tasting the dirt in a grave is amusing. I think Hwa-rim’s dancing might be meant as a joke. But the wisecracks about money and making bank off these “rich” Korean-Americans are openly humorous, as is the occasional generational jab.

“This is why it’s tough working with geezers.”

Choi Min-sik, a veteran of the original “Oldboy,” as well as “I Saw the Devil” and “Lucy,” brings gravitas to Kim that gives us someone to connect with, someone who sees the “everyone could get killed” stakes. Kim Go-eun (“Canola”) nicely suggests a young woman who has probably just aged enough to truly take her job seriously.

But as interesting as many of these folkways and cultural supernaturalist quirks are, and as apt as the whole Korean-Japanese bad blood thing is as a subtext, the meandering narrative robs “Exhuma” of much of its punch.

The third act has higher stakes and violence and rituals that race against a clock. But by then the story’s spell has dissipated, and any hope the tale might twist into something scarier, sadder or funnier is long gone.

Rating: unrated, supernatural violence

Cast: Kim Go-eun, Choi Min-sik, Lee Do-hyun and
Yoo Hae-jin

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Jae-hyun Jang. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:14