Na Hong-jin
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
The Exorcist (1973)
Directed by William Friedkin
influenced The Wailing (2016), Hope (2026)
Themes Characters Visuals
…imagine if William Friedkin, fresh off directing The Exorcist, had decided to make Star Wars instead of Sorcerer.
She swears, she ridicules her father (Kwak Do-won), she makes grotesque drawings, but—in a way—it’s creepier because it’s still her voice, not a demon’s grotesque voice like in The Exorcist.
Rather than playing a game of spot-the-allusion, Na is digging into the religious fabric of a country where old traditions still hold sway, and the long sequence where a shaman (Hwang Jung-min) attempts to perform a “death hex” against a marauding spirit to the pounding soundtrack of drums feels excitingly closer to ethnography than The Exorcist.
This ferociously full-tilt horror-mystery hybrid carries echoes aplenty from the Western horror canon, with nods to The Exorcist, The Shining (in a mesmeric aerial shot following a car along a twisty, lushly forested mountain road), and Poltergeist—if only because The Wailing echoes that film’s accumulative frenzy, crazily piling up one damned (and I do mean damned) thing after another.
At the same time, he puts western tropes from “The Exorcist,” “The Evil Dead” and even “Outbreak” through the blender, but the cryptic denouement, which delves into the abysmally dark cave of the human psyche, is pure Polanski.
Fitting neatly into the festival’s cannibal phenomena (there were five cannibalism-related pictures in the festival), “The Wailing” borrows ever so gently from “The Exorcist” to weave an intricate tale of horror that is part who-(or what)-done-it.
A chimera of influences, from Jaws, though Attack on Titan, and even Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
…an expertly crafted monster movie with Spielbergian sensibilities (à la Jaws)…
It starts by following the Jaws rule well enough by not showing its monster until the 35-minute mark.
…perhaps stretching out the scarier when unseen “Jaws” approach for the rest of the movie…
Few Hollywood legends hold more enduring power than the ones surrounding the making of Jaws, when a 28-year-old filmmaking prodigy named Steven Spielberg recognized that his production’s mechanical shark was a piece of junk and transformed his shocker about a great white into a masterpiece of suspense about an unseen monster lurking in the deep.
Where American cinema has spent decades trying (and mostly failing) to chase the mix of restraint and spectacle in "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park,"…
…swoops in and out and around and through roads and side alleys as if he’d seen “Mad Max: Fury Road” and got drunk on that film’s motorized exhilaration…
Not since Mad Max: Fury Road has a film slammed its foot down on the accelerator so hard.
…with the Croisette having not seen this much carnage since Fury Road.
…its closest comp would be Mad Max: Fury Road…
…some of the finest action filmmaking this side of Mad Max: Fury Road…
It’s the kind of reaction reserved for bangers like Mad Max: Fury Road, especially given just how much of Hope unfolds on roads and highways at a hundred miles an hour, with characters leaning out of cop cars and practically kissing the pavement; the comparison isn’t unwarranted.
…think of James Cameron’s “Avatar” miracles, especially in “The Way of Water.”
The creatures themselves land somewhere between A Quiet Place and Avatar, all thick carapace, lanky jointed limbs, and impossible speed.
…it would be a shame if Na is actually looking at the Avatar series as his North Star because James Cameron’s films are starting, at least from a story perspective, to peter out…
…in a final coda, we see the clear influence of Avatar’s Na’vi…
…al imaginario de James Cameron, tanto al belicismo de ‘Aliens’ como a la construcción mitológica de ‘Avatar’…
…the motion-capture work is comparable to Avatar, which keeps winning Oscars for doing this kind of thing.
Memories of Murder (2003)
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
influenced The Wailing (2016), The Chaser (2008)
Themes Characters Visuals Plot
In the spirit of other South Korean films like Memories of Murder , The Host , I Saw the Devil , and Park Chan-wook's early work, among others, The Wailing thrives on genre crosspollination and tonal hyperbole, particularly a destabilizing contrast of broad comedy with ultraviolent portentousness.
It’s a blender of all your favorite recent genre films from Korea, there’s the bumbling but competently-passable detective, à la Bong Joon-ho‘s Memories of Murder, there’s some comic relief from the people overseeing the fallout of a deathly crisis that’s gripped the town, à la Bong’s The Host, there’s an exorcism that beats up a demon about as bad as Oldboy did in Park Chan-wook‘s Oldboy.
Bong mined similar hick-cop sight gags in Memories of Murder, but where that film’s search for an elusive serial killer interrogated institutional and individual frailties, The Wailing remains focused on a completely external threat.
But there are also echoes of a great South Korean policier, Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (03), in the sense we get of an enigma that becomes ever more unfathomable until we’re gazing into an abyss of sheer delirium.
While it is reminiscent of Bong Joon-ho's "Memories of Murder" with its comical cops, awful crimes, rural locations and incessant rain, "The Wailing" adds a supernatural aspect which Hong-Jin keeps twisting, throwing us and his protagonist off balance until the very last moments.
The comparisons to Bong Joon-ho’s “Memories of Murder” are warranted, but “The Wailing” can also be described as “The Exorcist” having a demonic, vomit-spewing baby with “The Departed” with Alan Parker’s “Angel Heart” overseeing the bastard offspring’s circumcision.
…the guilty pleasure of a bang-bang-bang popcorn flick in the style of The Host…
Hope takes its place alongside The Wailing, The Host (2006) and No Other Choice as a great example of South Korea’s mastery of genre cinema.
Imagine if the run for your lives! havoc unleashed in “The Host” or “The War of the Worlds” was stretched out for the better part of an hour…
Hope departs from other great films of its ilk, like Bong Joon Ho’s The Host, by picking a rural setting.
It’s on par with The Host as one of the coolest monster movies to ever come out of South Korea.
One of the best giant monster films of the last 20 years, The Host, showed they know how to deliver rampaging beastie cinema.
…while its forest scenes come increasingly to resemble John McTiernan’s Predator (1987)…
Then finally the big reveal, a Predator lookalike, and a very tall one who seems part human, part lizard.
Surgen los guiños al film original de la saga ‘Depredador’ –sobre todo en la parte del film que transcurre en la jungla…
This isn’t a case like “Predator” or even “Transformers” where there’s a group of actors with strong personalities that can do away with subtlety because of how they fit the roles.
…others looming between the trees stalking their human prey like the Predator alien.
It’s like if Dr. Alan Grant got to Jurassic Park and instead of a photorealistic Brachiosaurus, he was greeted by Corey Stoll’s M.O.D.O.K. from “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”
Where American cinema has spent decades trying (and mostly failing) to chase the mix of restraint and spectacle in "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park,"…
For me, that was the golden era of blockbuster monster movies: The Mummy, Deep Blue Sea, The Relic, and, yes, Jurassic Park.
…by now indistinguishable Transformers-style beasts…
…not since Michael Bay’s Transformers films have I seen an action film blend practical effects and CGI so expertly…
This isn’t a case like “Predator” or even “Transformers” where there’s a group of actors with strong personalities that can do away with subtlety because of how they fit the roles.
Mr. Na enjoys overt directorial misdirection as well; early on, the scenes that end with Jong-gu waking in a panic from a bad dream are numerous enough to remind one of Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.”
Local gossip settles on a recent arrival, an older Japanese man crudely referred to as "The Jap" (Jun Kunimura, of Audition and Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2), who lives in an isolated cabin with his dog, but Jong-Gu is increasingly distracted by trouble at home: Hyo-Jin, normally an outgoing, fun-loving child, begins acting out in ways that strongly suggest either mental illness or virulent, early-onset teenage-jerk syndrome.
He begins hearing odd tales about a Japanese stranger (Kunimura Jun, "Kill Bill") as more and more eerie occurrences plague his village and his own daughter Hyo-jin (Kim Hwan-hee) succumbs to "The Wailing."
Kunimura Jun (Kill Bill: Volume 1) is likewise excellent as the Japanese stranger, despite not having much dialogue.
But the authorities’ feeble effort to blame these gruesome events on a toxic batch of mushrooms doesn’t last long, and local attention turns back toward “the Jap” — seriously, that’s what he’s called in the subtitles — a mysterious old man who lives alone in the forest, played by veteran Japanese actor Jun Kunimura (seen in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movies).
Scenes like this hark back to Ridley Scott’s Alien…
There’s an evident debt to H.R Giger’s Alien Xenomorphs…
…adding yet another layer that feels as if it were ripped from some acid trip cross between Resident Evil and Final Fantasy…
…resembling the zombie dogs from Resident Evil if they were infected with Venom…
The monster designs look like H.R. Giger knockoffs from the Prometheus pre-production phase brought to life by CGI that occasionally look unfinished.
As for the creature design one cannot help think of the Hulk via Stranger Things and Prometheus…
Not since "Prometheus" or perhaps "A Quiet Place: Day One" has a blockbuster so convincingly captured the existential horror of humans pitted against an unstoppable force of nature…
A chimera of influences, from Jaws, though Attack on Titan, and even Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
The easiest way to describe Hope, while leaving the lion’s share of its monster mysteries intact, is: Eddington meets Spielberg’s War of the Worlds meets Attack on Titan.
As for the creature design one cannot help think of the Hulk via Stranger Things and Prometheus…
The Abomination from “The Incredible Hulk” (2008)…
This ferociously full-tilt horror-mystery hybrid carries echoes aplenty from the Western horror canon, with nods to The Exorcist, The Shining (in a mesmeric aerial shot following a car along a twisty, lushly forested mountain road), and Poltergeist—if only because The Wailing echoes that film’s accumulative frenzy, crazily piling up one damned (and I do mean damned) thing after another.
Imagine if the run for your lives! havoc unleashed in “The Host” or “The War of the Worlds” was stretched out for the better part of an hour…
En la primera mitad de ‘Hope’, se impone un tratamiento de la acción que privilegia el fuera de campo y que hace pensar en el cine de Alfred Hitchcock (la mítica escena de la avioneta de ‘Con la muerte en los talones’)…
…scenes that alternate between the dizzying terrors of director Na Hong-jin’s last film, The Wailing, and something out of William Friedkin’s The French Connection, with cameras low to the ground as they zip around tight turns.