Review: The Wailing (2016)

The Wailing is a mystery/horror story that I was pretty sure I’d only watch once, and the third time has made it to the K-Movie column. Horror is a great genre because of the room for creativity, and sometimes it’s just fun to see a bunch of tropes melded together. At first glance, The Wailing’s story elements are mashed together in a way that should feel less coherent, but it somehow flows pretty well as long as you're paying attention. There's fear of disease, ghosts, and demons (and even a little zombie action), and it can all be traced back to a lone Japanese man, an outsider whose presence in a small Korean village makes him the first culprit of everything going wrong—and being the scapegoat as the odd man out can be its own nightmare fuel.

The movie follows Jonggu (Kwak Dowon), an oafish policeman who's not great at his job and certainly not prepared for the situation at hand (in his defense, he is a cop, not a detective). He's the type to nap until he's late for work; when there's an uptick of murders in the area, he's one of many just bumbling around, waiting for answers to surface. These murders all have very specific details in common: someone is ailed by a dark rash that boils their skin just days before they violently murder their own family. By the time the cops arrive in these instances, the person in question has become completely feral; some days later, they've either taken their own life or the illness has done it for them.

Jonggu is inconvenienced at worst. Even with the grisly nature of the crimes, he’s not much of a problem-solver; but when his daughter, Hyojin (Kim Hwanhee), suddenly falls ill, Jonggu launches himself into the frontline of the investigation—though it’s entirely independent of his police work. There’s been talk of the local old Japanese man (Kunimura Jun), and one woman claims he’s a ghost who, if you see him more than once, it’s because he’s stalking you with the intention of sucking your blood dry. When they investigate his ramshackle home on the mountain, it takes about five seconds for Jonggu’s partner to find pretty damning evidence in the form of a room plastered with before-and-after photos of the people who’ve died among many, many others. On the floor, there’s a pile of items that are clearly trophies from the dead, and on top of the stack is one of Hyojin’s shoes. Here, it’s important to note that Jonggu never saw any of it himself.

Overnight, Hyojin becomes a different person, screaming in rage and promising her family she’ll kill them. Her grandmother finds a shaman to exorcize her, and it opens an interesting dispute between the perception of a spiritual guru and the Catholic church. Where one tells Jonggu that the Japanese man is a ghost and “not everything that moves, breathes, and talks is alive,” the other says he’s alive and to just bring his daughter to the hospital. The uncertainty that hangs over him is the most compelling part of the story. Jonggu is left to act purely on rumors, and the only thing he knows for certain is that his daughter is dying. This all comes to a head when two people offer Jonggu opposing advice at once—the shaman says the woman is responsible and not to listen to her, the woman says the shaman is on the side of the devil. With no way to determine which has been his false shepherd all along, it comes down to Jonggu’s guess as to who that is.

It may just be because Jonggu is instantly framed as a kind of likable, normal dude, but The Wailing has a strong atmospheric weight throughout that may only work through that lens of a well-intentioned schlub. Each discovery he makes feels significant, and the intensity in what he experiences is translated so clearly in the details that the mystery unfolding feels like the viewer is doing a good chunk of the leg work. This is due to the framing of Jonggu’s situation, making a lot of room for viewers to think hard alongside him about what we would do in his situation; we watch closely for some secret thing that might make the answer obvious. By the end, Jonggu is exhausted, and so are we, and the experience is so charming that The Wailing has greater rewatch value than initially anticipated.

Edited By Vivian N.