The U.S. title of Na Hong-jin’s new film, The Wailing, suggests tone more than it does sound. There is wailing to be heard here, yes, and plenty of it, but in two words Na coyly predicts his audience’s reaction to the movie’s grim tableaus of a county in spiritual strife. Though The Wailing ostensibly falls in the “horror” bin, Na trades in doubt and especially despair more than in what we think of as “horror.” He isn’t out to terrify us. He’s out to corrode our souls, much in the same way that his protagonist’s faith is corroded after being subject to both divine and infernal tests over the course of the film. You may not leave the theater scared, but you will leave it scarred, which is by far a more substantive response than naked fear.
Not that there isn’t enough horror in The Wailing to make our skin crawl, our stomachs churn, our eyes pinch shut. This is an incredibly creepy and oft-unsettling film, but Na finds the tug of disbelief far more upsetting than the sight of bodies cut apart and blood splattering the wall. What do you do when your holy authority figures fail you? What do you do when you can’t trust your perception? Na has made these ideas, though hardly new in the horror canon, his film’s full purpose, and his conclusions are devastatingly bleak. When The Wailing arrives at its final, spectacular half hour, you’ll vow never to ask these questions about your own life, ever.
The Wailing unfolds in Gokseong County, an agricultural community nestled among South Korea’s southern provinces. It’s a lovely, bucolic setting that Na and his cinematographer, the incredible Hong Kyung-pyo, take fullest advantage of aesthetically and thematically: Every shot could be put in a frame and hung up in an art gallery. The hushed serenity blanketing The Wailing’s opening images creates an atmosphere of peace that Na is all too happy to subvert (similar to how he subverts Bible verses). The film’s first full sequence shatters the calm as Sergeant Jeon Jong-gu (Kwak Do-won, turning in a knockout performance) is called to the scene of a savage multiple murder. When Jong-gu shows up, all is bedlam; people are screaming and crying, emergency workers litter the area like ants at a gory picnic, and the killer sits in a stupor, unaware of neither the mayhem nor the vicious boils coating their skin.
It’s a crime unlike any Jong-gu and his colleagues have ever encountered. They’re as devastated as the friends and neighbors of the slain. Worse, it keeps happening: Otherwise rational people break out in hives, go berserk, and slaughter their families. The town rumor mill suggests that a nameless Japanese man (Jun Kunimura), referred to in the credits as “the Stranger” and by the characters as “the Jap,” is responsible for the insanity, but the “how” and “why” are unknown. So Jong-gu attempts to solve the mystery, and with increasing desperation when his daughter contracts the illness and starts losing her mind. It’s a tale of a father’s love pitted against forces outside his control and which he does not comprehend.