The Wailing (2016)

The Wailing is a pretty good example of a Korean horror picture that simply piles on. See also I Saw the Devil. It’s long, at over two and a half hours, and more of a slow burn for the first hour. You have to be a little patient with it—and forgive some of its impulses toward broad humor, in the style of Jong Boon Ho. Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), a police officer in a small village, investigates a number of strange and brutal murders along with some kind of epidemic that is turning locals mad in a rabid kind of way. Nothing is right and everything is wrong. The chief suspect is a Japanese man no one knows (Jun Kunimura), who moved to the village shortly before the incidents started. Then the behavior of the police officer’s young daughter changes. Hyo-jin (Hwan-hee Kim), perhaps 10 years old, grows moody, disrespectful, violent. The mother in this family, Jong-goo’s wife with no name (Jang So-yeon), gets on the case and decides calling in a shaman is what’s needed here. In short order this shaman (Hwang-Jung-min) finds a dead crow in the family’s barrel of soy sauce brewing in the backyard and even he is impressed with what they’re up against. Folk horror. Exorcism rituals are called for, which may be the best part of The Wailing. As with so many movies over two and a half hours there’s an argument that 30 or 40 minutes could be trimmed away here. The counterargument would be trying to figure out what to cut from a very busy, complicated script with lots of twists and turns. You would basically have to simplify the story and I think the complexity has a lot to do with what makes The Wailing work as well as it does. It’s immersive, with all its many plot points developed organically—again reminiscent of I Saw the Devil, continually overtopping itself. I counted at least two points where The Wailing felt like it was ending only to turn a corner into wider vistas and deeper complications. It has some pretty scary moments too, I must say, although I often wondered if I needed to fiddle with the contrast and brightness of my monitor because a lot of these scenes are too dark to pick out meaningful detail. I’m willing to take that as a device to keep us off balance as viewers—or maybe you can see it better on a big screen—but I don’t have to like it. It’s also another story that leans into its family beats and looks for a lot of dramatic juice there. Normally I think horror should shock and it should be scary and it is necessarily a little antidramatic, which is why it tends to work best in shorter movies and short stories. But horror can obviously be done at great length too, pivoting toward melodrama and/or high style. I like The Wailing even if ultimately it feels like two or three other movies stitched together. At least they have been stitched together artfully.