The Wailing (2016) Review!!

Synopsis – A stranger arrives in a little village and soon after a mysterious sickness starts spreading. A policeman is drawn into the incident and is forced to solve the mystery in order to save his daughter.

My Take – I have been fascinated by South Korean films for a sometime now. The films coming out of their industry are quite rare, as they tend to excel in almost every genre. I don’t know how but the quality of their films just keep increasing with every passing film, and this film by director Na Hong-jin is no different. Yes, this goes down as one of the best horror films I’ve watched. On the second thought, it’s one of the best films I had the pleasure of watching! It’s smart, it’s clever and it’s beautiful! Director Na Hong-jin‘s debut film, The Chaser (2008), audaciously broke one of cinema’s golden rules to heartbreaking effect. His sophomore effort The Yellow Sea (2010), also a pulsating rush of blood and bone. Six years later, he is back with a a gruesome blend of different genres in the form of a supernatural thriller that veers between caustic comedy and blood-soaked horror over the course of its operatically intense 156 minute run time. This a rare kind of horror film which does not rely on any kind of jump scare, but solely depends on shock value to scare the guts out of its audience. Seriously, it’s been 24 hours since I’ve seen this film and I keep finding myself replaying the film in my head over and over. I find myself reflecting on the themes that it tries to bring to the surface. Words that you won’t actually use to describe typical horror films. What makes this film transcend its genre is that it has so many layers but each one is as potent as the other. Director Na Hong-jin has graduated to a whole new level with this film, a smorgasbord of investigative procedural, humor, horror, supernatural, family drama, and near un-killable zombies. To better understand the hidden themes of the film, I had to search through interviews of the director on what he wants the viewers to take away with them. It helped a lot how the film came to be. He started writing the script of the film when a series of deaths started happening to his friends/family members. Though he didn’t elaborate, he termed the deaths as “unnatural” which leaves me to think they were murdered. Grieved with the loss of his friends, he started asking “why them?”. It brought him to a journey asking different religions to somehow demystify it. This film was a result of that exploration.

The story follows Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), an overweight, less-than-intelligent low-ranking policeman who lives in the countryside village of Gokseong with his wife (So-yeon Jang), his mother-in-law, and his beloved daughter Hyo-jin. As soon as a mysterious Japanese stranger (Jun Kunimura) moves in, the village becomes plagued by sickness. The police think a wild mushroom is to blame, but Jong-goo and his partner are sure it has something to do with the stranger. Soon a couple of grisly murders begin to ensue all around the village. People begin killing one another in frenzies of homicidal glee. They’re also growing rashes and boils all over their bodies, erupting in foul-mouthed rages, running around naked at night, seeing ghosts, hiring shamans, and burning down their own houses. When his daughter starts to show signs of the sickness, Jong-goo gets personal and must figure out whether to trust the mysterious young woman named Moo-Myeong (Chun Woo-Hee) or the bombastic shaman (Hwang Jung-Min). It is the intricate workings of the plot that needs a lot of unpacking. Forget about the age-old Hollywood adage that a good film has a plot that is easily summarized. The last time I had so much fun dismantling and assembling back a film was Inception! What makes the film so special is that there are almost no jump scares at all in this film. Instead, we, the viewers, are taken through a story rich with mystery, great characters and their struggles, dark atmosphere with well designed and amazingly crafted horror scenes that make your blood run cold. Also, in addition the film carries a great subtext left for the viewer to question, find evidence and interpret it. You can feel that the director took some time and did some research to give us as much real horror experience as possible. For the first hour, the film is a horror-adjacent darkly comedic mystery. What made a local build a giant nest in his house, collect mushrooms, and then brutally murder a local ginseng farmer and his wife? Why is this murderer covered in boils? Does all the mushroom shit in his blood have anything to do with it? Or — as locals whisper — was he led to do this by a middle-aged Japanese man, a new arrival in town whom many claim a) strips naked to eat rotten deer carcasses in the woods and b) is actually a ghost? Jong-goo’s investigations of the first couple murders in town are deeply, deeply, comedic, to the point where I started to wonder if I’d got my information wrong and this film was actually a parody-horror film. Jong-goo and his colleagues are profoundly inept, and their investigations are a series of slapstick set pieces I spent this whole first hour desperately trying to identify the horror subgenre this film was trying to be. A zombie film? A ghost story? A psychedelic drug fad gone wrong? There are moments in the beginning of the film where it genuinely seems as if there will be a scientific explanation for everything happening in Gokseong. But the film goes steady with none of these explanations. By the time Jong-goo’s family is touched by the rage-rash plague, the tone of the film has changed. Director Na starts out playing improbable lightning-strike injuries for laughs but ends the film with blood splattered homes and genuinely-scary, even quite literally subterranean journeys into the hearts of various darknesses.

First, we leave comedy-land for criminal thriller territory. Then the film turns into a Korean version of The Exorcist, then immediately veers hard back into comedy for an action scene where a lynch mob tries to hunt down the Japanese visitor, then dives into a pit of drama and genuine horror which only gets more and more intense — and more and more about religion — the longer the film goes on. It is absolutely impossible to predict the direction of the plot at any point during the story, and so long as you are willing to accept each scene for whatever-the-fuck it is, it’s an amazing ride. The film forces us to evaluate who brings unspeakable tragedies into this world. Should we blame the devil for laying down the trap? Or should we blame ourselves for being too blind to see it? I think this point was the one that resonated with me: people in this day and age have become desensitized with evil that we rarely think that the devil is real in a physical sense. There’s that unbelief in the supernatural that it has no place in our reality. Just like Jong Goo who had heard of (he charged it to village rumors) and seen the Devil (he thought he was a serial killer, nothing more) before but never really understood what he was up against. Several times, he was also given a warning… to stay away from the tragic path he was walking into (through his dreams and the most blatant one, to wait for the third crow of the roosters) but alas, Jong Goo relied on what was logical in our reality. It’s more logical and easier to believe that our nightmares can never happen in the real world. It’s more logical to rush back home when your family is in danger. It’s more logical to believe in a religious figure (priest/shaman) than a woman you suspect is a ghost. And that same unbelief is the very tool that the devil uses against us. The one drawback for the film is a significant one that takes the shine off what could otherwise have been a landmark film. During the course of the film director Na throws a number of questions and macguffins up in the air. Who or what is causing the fever? Can the shaman be trusted? Is the Japanese stranger a victim of xenophobia? Who is the nameless girl always hovering around the crime scenes? Or is it all just collective hallucination caused by bad mushrooms? the film takes its twists and turns, apparently answering some of the questions and overturning expectations. But for a general audience stand point the sudden changes in tones & the open ending could end up disappointing anyone who kept waiting for a big reveal at the end. This is a film about what happens when authorities collapse and sense flies out the window on batty wings. As it draws to its conclusion, various characters each desperately try to solve the problem by following the instructions of their own beliefs. By the final few scenes there are so many different valid interpretations flying around that we completely understand Jong-goo’s helpless confusion. But somehow, miraculously, the film nevertheless manages to remain deeply and intensely rewarding on a moment-to-moment basis, even though the overall story deliberately is never entirely coherent. The acting generally speaking is fantastic. The father tasked with solving whatever is happening to his daughter, conveys the terror and hatred he is building up with an intense persona he carries throughout the film. A priest in training who comes in to give advice on what the father should do is equally effective. He brings a concerned and innocent quality to the terror that will ultimately happen. But it is the young daughter who gets sick, that really shines. On the whole, ‘The Wailing’ is an absolute rollercoaster of disjointed genres and tones, and I loved almost every crosshatched over-the-top frenzied mix of comedy, horror, thriller, and mystery moment of it. Films of this type are rare and such superb rare films wail out to be watched and experienced.