The Wailing (2016)
Directed by Na Hong-jin
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.
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What critics say influenced The Wailing
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
Director of Photography Hong Kyung-pyo ("Snowpiercer") uses natural lighting and stylish camera work to complement Hong-Jin's vision.
His work on Snowpiercer was as successful at helping establish a natural lived-in quality, the bonus effect here is that The Wailing’s fantastical moments earn a real kick and a bonus element of discomforting reality.
He and his crew — particularly cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo ("Snowpiercer") and production designer Lee Hwo-kyung — also create a compelling and foreboding atmosphere that finds scares in the most everyday of places and scenarios.
Since the early aughts, South Korea has been one of the most prolific and exciting exporters of genre cinema, giving us such indelible gems as Oldboy, The Host, Snowpiercer, to name but a few.
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.
He has made other terrific movies in a more familiar action-adventure vein, including “The Chaser” and “The Yellow Sea.”
A weird Japanese stranger seems to bring rampant evil to a remote and still superstitious South Korean village in this huge local success for director Na Hong-jin (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea).
With two features under his belt – 2008's The Chaser (an unexpectedly affecting serial-killer thriller inspired by true events), and 2010's The Yellow Sea (an ultraviolent exercise in desolation) – Na has one of the most assured sensibilities to come along in genre film during the last 10 years.
The Wailing is written and directed by Na Hong-jin, who became a household named to cinephiles with the harrowing thriller The Chaser, and the haunting story of desperation, The Yellow Sea.
It took six months for writer-director Na Hong-jin (The Chaser) to shoot the movie, and the apparently painstaking approach of Na and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (a collaborator of Bong Joon-ho’s) has resulted in a story that truly feels saturated with a sense of spiritual foreboding.
Na’s The Chaser and The Yellow Sea are riveting thrillers, but what the director accomplishes here is quite different.
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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.
The Wailing‘s tone shifts to super serious and tacks on multiple different endings and rug pulls for another 40 minutes, à la Kim Jee-woon‘s I Saw the Devil.
Na Hong-jin continues to utilize the tense atmosphere found within his two previous films, but “The Wailing” has shades of Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil,” which allows the film to explore violently haunting imagery.
Six years after Kim Jee-woon electrified audiences with his bleak serial killer thriller “I Saw the Devil,” one of his fellow Korean auteurs has replied with a riotously mangled supernatural horror film that asks with an impish grin: “Are you sure about that?” Already a monster hit back home, Na Hong-jin’s spellbinding and scatterbrained “The Wailing” is 156 minutes of demented occult nonsense that gradually begins to feel less like a linear scary story than that it does a ritualistic invocation of the antichrist.
The Wailing is also disturbingly gory, and at times on par with Kim Jee-won’s I Saw the Devil.
South Korea has proved fertile ground for genre films, from ruthless revengers such as I Saw the Devil and Oldboy to stranger fare like this year's terrific Train to Busan .
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.