The Wailing (2016)

Let me be upfront: I finished The Wailing genuinely unsure of what I'd just watched. Not in a frustrated, "this is nonsense" way, but in a "right, I need to sit with this for a bit" way. That's a rare and strange feeling, and honestly, it's a big part of why this film has stayed with me. Whether that's a feature or a bug probably depends on your tolerance for ambiguity, and by the end I wasn't entirely sure which camp I fell into.

What I can say without hesitation is that this is a superb piece of Korean horror filmmaking. The atmosphere is thick from the off. There's a damp, rural unease to every frame, the kind of creeping dread that gets under your skin before anything particularly horrible has even happened. The cinematography is gorgeous in a quietly unsettling way, all mist and mountain and shadow. It reminded me, in spirit if not in style, of the rural folk horror mood I got from The Witch (2015). That same sense that something ancient and wrong has taken root in the landscape and the community doesn't have the language to deal with it.

The performances are exceptional across the board. The lead carries an enormous amount of the film, playing a local policeman who is equal parts bumbling and deeply sympathetic. You root for him completely even as he keeps making the wrong calls. The child actress, meanwhile, delivers something genuinely frightening in the film's later stretches. It's the kind of performance that makes you feel uncomfortable for being impressed by it.

The plot itself is a proper slow-burn mystery and for a long stretch it's absolutely gripping to watch unravel. Strange deaths in a small village. A mysterious Japanese stranger. Rumours, fear, superstition bleeding into what might be something genuinely supernatural. The film plays brilliantly with the idea of not knowing who or what to trust, and it layers in religious imagery, folklore and genre conventions in ways that feel genuinely fresh. Korean cinema has such a gift for this kind of storytelling, which is part of why I keep coming back to it. Much like Memories of Murder, there's a real texture to the way it uses its provincial setting and its ordinary, fallible characters to build something enormous and troubling.

But here's where my feelings get complicated. The ending. I don't want to get into specifics, but the film makes a series of choices in its final act that I found genuinely difficult to parse, even after thinking about them for a good while. There are interpretations out there, and some of them are compelling, but the film doesn't give you enough solid ground to land on any of them with confidence. That can be brilliant when it's earned. Here, I'm not completely sure it is. It feels less like deliberate ambiguity and more like the story losing its grip just when it needed to tighten.

And then there's the runtime. Two and a half hours. Look, I'm not someone who automatically objects to long films. Some stories need the space. But The Wailing is a film that, in my view, could comfortably lose twenty to thirty minutes and be all the sharper for it. There are sections in the middle where the pacing sags noticeably, and you feel the weight of it. When a film is building towards an ending that confuses rather than satisfies, every unnecessary minute in the middle starts to feel more costly in retrospect.

So where does that leave me? Three and a half stars, and I mean that genuinely rather than as a compromise. The craft on display here is remarkable. The chills are real. The central mystery is compelling for most of its runtime. This is absolutely worth your time if you're a fan of Korean cinema or horror with genuine atmosphere and ambition. Just go in prepared for a finale that might leave you staring at the ceiling rather than feeling the catharsis you've been building towards for two hours. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes it isn't. Here, just about, it is.

Three and a half stars.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 2016  | Watched: 2025-05-03

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from South Korea: Memories of Murder (2003) · Peninsula (2020) · Lost in Starlight (2025) · The Handmaiden (2016)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More mystery: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · One Way or Another (1975)