The Wailing (2016)
★★★½ — The Wailing (2016)
South Korean cinema has had a remarkable run over the past two decades, building a reputation for genre films that take familiar premises and push them somewhere altogether more unsettling. Na Hong-jin's The Wailing (2016) arrived at the height of that wave, and it arrived with considerable weight behind it. Produced with the involvement of Fox International Productions alongside local partners Ivanhoe Pictures and Side Mirror, the film dropped into a market that was already paying close attention to Korean horror and thriller work. Na Hong-jin had previously made two well-regarded crime thrillers in Korea, so the move into supernatural horror territory was watched with real interest. The result is a film that blends folk religion, demonic possession, village paranoia and police procedural into something that sits quite comfortably alongside other standout Korean genre pictures of the period, such as The Handmaiden, which also came out the same year. For a sense of how consistently South Korean cinema has delivered on the genre front, it is also worth looking back at Memories of Murder, another film rooted in a small community grappling with something it cannot quite explain.
The premise is rooted in a particular kind of rural dread. A stranger arrives in a remote mountain village, and almost immediately a strange, violent sickness begins to spread among the locals. The film centres on Jong-goo, a bumbling but well-meaning village policeman played by Kwak Do-won, who finds himself drawn into the investigation when the illness begins to threaten his own young daughter. Kwak carries much of the film's emotional weight, playing Jong-goo as a man out of his depth without ever making him feel like a fool, and the performance is grounded enough to keep the more outlandish material feeling personal rather than abstract. Hwang Jung-min brings a very different kind of energy as a local shaman whose involvement in the unfolding crisis becomes increasingly significant, while Jun Kunimura plays the mysterious Japanese stranger at the centre of the suspicion with a quietness that proves far more unsettling than any more theatrical approach would have been. Kim Hwan-hee, as Jong-goo's daughter, handles some genuinely difficult material with a composure that is striking for a performer of her age. Chun Woo-hee rounds out the principal cast in a role that resists easy categorisation and is better approached with as little foreknowledge as possible. At two hours and thirty-six minutes, The Wailing is a significant commitment, and Na Hong-jin uses that runtime to layer atmosphere, folklore and uncertainty into something that has sparked debate among viewers ever since its release. Whether the length serves the material is, frankly, a fair question to bring to it.
Super confusing Great example of Korean horror. It was chilling, creepy, atmospheric and with really strong acting and cinematography. The plot was really fun to watch unfold but the ending is really confusing to figure out exactly what happened. It was also 2.5hrs long which is way too long for this film imo
I would steer anyone curious about this corner of horror towards You Won't Be Alone, which shares that same quality of using genre conventions to get at something more folkloric and strange, and similarly commits to its own atmosphere even when the pace slackens. The confusion around The Wailing's ending is not incidental, by the way. It seems to be the point, or at least a large part of it, and there is a reasonable argument that Na Hong-jin is more interested in the feeling of not knowing than in any tidy resolution. Whether that makes the ambiguity earned or merely frustrating probably depends on your tolerance for films that leave you in the dark. For me, the creeping dread and the central performances kept me with it, even when the runtime was testing my patience. A difficult film to shake, even if it is equally difficult to fully account for.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2016 | Watched: 2025-05-03
Trailer
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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)
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