I Would Like to See It: The Wailing

The Wailing is that rare film which immediately and without room for discussion establishes itself as crucial to its genre. Directed with intimate, disorienting finesse and written with throat-closing tension by master craftsman Na Hong-jin, the film spins together influences as diverse as zombie movies, Hong Kong black magic thrillers, Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and the convoluted tricks, relentless, hungering evil, and moral double binds common to Korean folklore. Na’s camera is deeply immersive, pushing vertigo onto viewers with oblique angles and framing the mild dilapidation and eclectic architecture of the mountainous rural village of Gokseong with painterly precision. Each shot is composed with such care that the first act’s pratfalls and madcap humor — all delightfully human and believable — seem almost miraculous. Their simple existence should be inimical to Na’s careful visual ordering of his fictional world; instead, they fold into it seamlessly.

Beyond his flare for framing and the film’s exquisitely subtle color grading — the balance during forest and other outdoor scenes is especially clear and engrossing — the director’s greatest strength is his heavy use of passive motion. Rain pounds Gokseong, slackens, gusts, and peters out. Forest canopies billow and sigh in rippling waves. The world is at work, its natural processes never contrived but always gently in sync with onscreen events. Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), a hopelessly out of his depth beat cop, employs a slouching, boyish body language to position himself perfectly against a world that seems bent on slowly, relentlessly pounding him into the ground. With his doughy physique and pouty, youthful features he seems more overgrown misfit than cop, and his explosions of violent temper and impulsive decision-making as chaos engulfs his life sketch out a fascinating character psychology without ever resorting to flashbacks or exposition. A boy disinclined to grow up wants the status and authority of adulthood, wants to solve his problems immediately and decisively, and so: the police, a complacent facsimile of mature manhood.

It’s Kim Kwan-hee in the role of Hyo-jin, Jong-goo’s young daughter, though, who gives the film its name. Her screams of rage, anguish, and frustration don’t so much piece the ear as claw at it until their ragged little nails find the tympanum and punch through it. During the film’s exorcism sequence her shrieks are so insistent and unrelenting as to render the sequence almost unwatchable, a primal alarm bell ringing out of context or control. It’s The Wailing’s second piece of shamanic ritual magic which acts as its visual and action centerpiece. Aware he’s sure to be targeted by enemies, the nameless Japanese outsider (the astonishing Jun Kunimura, still revealing new range in his 60s) prepares a bloody ritual with black chickens hanged by their legs all around him while rival shaman Il-gwang (Hwang Jung-min) enacts an elaborate death hex against him. The intercutting between the two gory, propulsive, musically driven rituals is some of the finest editing in modern horror. The trailing off of action in the wake of the rituals is both bold and supremely confident, adrenaline fading to a sour itch as the film begins revealing its true shape and wrapping Jong-goo and his family in increasingly convoluted coils. By the time it poses its fiendish riddle of a final act, the feeling it generates is of being asked to recite tongue twisters while caught in a bear trap. Masterful.