South Korea’s box office breakout is a frightening and muddled exploration of good vs evil.
Rarely are genre films so good at existing in multiple genres and pulling off those respective tropes with equal ease. The Wailing is one such film, leaving the viewer unsure of what they just saw, but explaining enough to be accessible to the mainstream (as is obvious by its box office success in Korea). “Chaser” director Na Hong-jin’s latest thriller will keep you hooked throughout, but may leave you wondering whether the 160 minute run time could have been used more effectively.
The first hour of The Wailing plays out like one of Fincher’s serial killer mysteries (think Se7en rather than Zodiac). Jong-gu (Kwak Do-Wan) is no Brad Pitt, but a humble family man who happens to be a middling cop. When a family is murdered and the killer found covered in boils resembling a burn victim, Jong-hu and his partner begin to investigate a series of similar crimes in the town of Goksung, where the film is set (and consequently the original Korean title of the film). The police soon target a new Japanese member of the community, a reclusive old man, as the cause of these tragedies. It suggests the film is possibly a slyly veiled attempt at discussing Korean and Japanese relations, but the sheer amount of sh*t that goes down over the course of the following 2 hours dissuades this assertion.
When Jong-gu’s daughter starts acting strangely, the film deftly changes form. Horrors of a supernatural form transmogrify The Wailing into a voodoo possession film. The highest praise that can be give to The Wailing is that you don’t realize it’s a horror film until you are scared for the first time. The cloudy visuals, low lighting, and presence of rain remains consistent throughout. The film starts in the same world it ends in, that world is just far more sinister than we could have possibly imagined.
There is a Shaman character who aids Jong-gu and his daughter. The film teeters on this precipice of good and evil, with each character falling into one category of the other, but you are never quite sure which. The Shaman is the exception. His true nature and motive is kept ambiguous, even after multiple false reveals. While this may be off-putting in a movie that offered so many answers, the lack of them in this case were what was most appealing. If only this had been a more consistent theme.
It is the constant barrage of images and information that keeps The Wailing afloat. There is rarely a scene that depicts rotting corpses, satanic knick knacks, or horrible screeching that does not also move the plot along in some crucial way. The disturbing moments have purpose, a sign of any half decent horror picture. If you choose to turn off your brain, The Wailing will excite and horrify. The narrative is compelling in a moment to moment sense, but the final revelation left my head shaking once I began to recall the opening events. There is an unshakable feeling that this film had the potential to rise above, instead we are left with an incredibly entertaining piece of brood.
There is a great film in The Wailing about fatherhood. But somewhere along the way, this thread got lost and was replaced with disturbing imagery and overclocked tension. There is a scene near what feels like it should be the end of The Wailing where two rituals are being performed in synchronicity. It is then when you realize the simplicity of the film’s struggle of good vs evil. The twists that come in the following hour reveal the true nature of the characters, but the film itself remains a bloody, entertaining ball of stress.
The Wailing is coming to theaters on June 3.
