A Korean village is high in the misty mountains. It is always raining, sometimes out of a clear sky. The road to the village climbs in daunting, slippery switchbacks. A car drives back and forth on the switchbacks. The car contains a shaman who had been summoned to the town where there have been many gruesome murders. In the village, the shaman goes to a home where a policeman's daughter, Hyo-Jin, is possessed by a demon. The shaman orders the fat cop, Jong-goo, to drag a jug of soy-sauce down from where it is apparently fermenting on a hillside behind the house. When the shaman breaks open the ceramic vat, the soy sauce washes out together with a big crow that has been steeping in the brew. The handsome shaman nods his head and says: "We've got a real wicked spirit here." Indeed.
The Korean director, Na Hong-jin is currently enjoying a moment of fame in the West on the basis of his horror film (premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2026) Hope. Reviews proclaim this new movie as the best thing since sliced bread. On the basis of that acclaim, I decided to take a look Na Hong-jin's earlier (2016) horror picture, The Wailing. It's a long and very elaborately produced picture clocking in at 2 hours and 36 minutes. It's impressive in a sort of grim way, but confusing, needlessly gory, and ultimately extremely confusing. (Large numbers of people ask Chat AI as to who is really responsible for the innumerable bloody killings in the film -- the AI, by the way, is also confused and the answer usually provided is not completely accurate.) One's tolerance for this film will have something to do with whether you like pictures with a killing or suicide or zombie attack every ten minutes or so; the characters are always bathed in blood and about half the shots feature people performing with faces, heads and hands dripping with gore. Curiously, the picture is not at all frightening. It has several extremely grotesque images which are memorable, but the movie isn't interesting in scaring the audience. It's effects are epic -- it's like the Iliad with one carefully depicted death after another, until in the end, the viewer is numb to it all. By the end of the movie (which, in fact, has multiple endings), I didn't care at all who or why people were being slaughtered. Sadly, there's nothing to really see here, although the movie is interesting in its cultural context and, certainly, can't be called boring although the whole thing is maddeningly repetitive. And there is certainly lots and lots of anguished wailing.
A evil spirit is haunting a squalid little Korean town that doesn't look like it's progressed past the 13th century. People go berserk for no reason and kill everyone in their families. The killer, covered in their victim's blood, are comatose, having fallen into some sort of catatonic trance. A plump, jolly cop named Jong-goo investigates the slayings. After about the tenth killing one would expect the Korean Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (or something on that order) in Seoul to intervene. No such luck: the hapless villagers are left to their own devices and ultimately have to enlist a Catholic seminarian (a priest in training) and an animist Shaman to deal (unsuccessfully) with the wicked forces in their village. Jong-goo has sex with someone, possibly a girlfriend, in a car. His daughter, an eleven-year old named Hyo-jin, has observed the act, but tells her daddy that "(she) won't tell anyone" about the transgression. These events somehow expose Hyo-jin to demonic possession. She ends up breaking out in a livid rash of suppurating sores and boils, eats ravenously, and threatens everyone around her with violent death. The townspeople, and ultimately the cops as well, blame the supernatural molestation on a "Jap" -- that is, a Japanese tourist who occupies a remote cottage high in the hills and whom we have seen fishing in the opening scenes: there is a big close-up of him impaling a worm on a hook. The Jap is reputed to be a demon, a suspicion that is confirmed seemingly, when the cop and his deputies go the man's cabin and find a sort of shrine in which there are photographs of the legions of people killed in town, both pictures of them alive and dead. Meanwhile, there is a zombie in the form of a naked man running around the steep, forested hills wearing a "diaper" as it is called in the film. The zombie attacks people from time to time and tears their flesh. When not attacking people, the zombie eats raw meat from the corpses of dead deer in the forest. It's always raining and people are soaked to the skin with rainwater when they're not covered in gore. Houses get burned down; a woman hangs herself from a lone tree at the edge of the squalid village. The shaman performs a ceremony involving the beheading of chickens and the sacrifice of a lamb as well as much dancing around a bonfire and pounding stakes into a wooden effigy. Cross-cut with the shaman's ritual is another ceremony that the so-called Jap is performing in his mountain lodge -- he's got a myriad of candles around him, chants, and kills ravens and crows. Neither of these two ceremonies has any real effect so far as I could see. Jong-goo is half-insane with anxiety about his daughter. He confronts the Jap, kills his dog, also a demonic-seeming black beast, and, then, later chases the man off a cliff in the mountains. There's a gruesome zombie attack and the creature has to be killed with blows from a rake and other sharp tools. The cop finally catches the Jap and beats him to death, rolling him off a mountain side in the downpour. (There's also a naked woman who runs around killing people and a young girl who squats on the roadway listlessly pitching stones at Jong-goo and his cops.) The shaman, who thinks his work is done after the Jap has been disposed of, leaves town, carrying a big Buddha in his backseat for protection. A shower of bird droppings from ravens and crows (apparently) drives him back into town. The shaman, now, concludes that the real villain is a ghost woman dressed all in white who has appeared to haunt the town beginning about ninety minutes into the movie. The seminarian leaves his Catholic church (the actual priest is helpless against the evil), goes to the Jap's ruinous cottage and discovers secret tunnels boring into the heart of the mountain. In the tunnels, the Jap is still performing some sort of rituals although he is a bit the worse for wear from having been beaten, run over, and thrown off a cliff. While the priest confronts the Jap in his candle-lit lair, Jong-goo encounters the woman in white, who probably is a ghost. She tells him to run back home to keep the possessed girl, Hyo-jin, from killing everyone. Jong-goo thinks she is trying to misdirect him because he has been told by the shaman that the ghost is the source of all mischief and that they murdered the wrong man, the innocent Jap. She says that the murders will occur when the cock crows three times. It's dawn with yellowish-red light seeping over the tops of the green and ragged mountains. The cock crows three times and Jong-goo runs home to find his wife and mother-in-law stabbed to death by the insane Hyo-jin. Jong-goo's encounter with the malign ghost is intercut with the seminarian's confrontation with the Jap in the underground tunnel. The sun rises. Jong-goo remembers happier days with his little daughter, a ride at a fair in which the cop tells her not to be afraid because her daddy will protect her.
The movie is certainly atmospheric and skillfully shot and edited. The acting consists mostly of wailing and other lamentations and there are a number of scary exorcism scenes involving Hyo-jin that are disturbing in their implications of child abuse. I haven't revealed the film's ending but it doesn't matter -- no one seems to understand it anyway. Every well-made horror movie implies a theology or, at least, a metaphysics. Because of cultural differences, I can't figure out the theology underlying this movie although theological concerns are clearly visible: the movie begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of Luke at Chapter 24, something about Jesus' resurrected body not being that of a ghost -- you can touch him and feel his flesh which is not true of ghosts. The film juxtaposes animistic rites performed by the opportunistic shaman -- he wants $10,000 for the big ceremony involving the chickens and goat (which doesn't work anyway)-- with a Christian understanding of evil: the movie involves a literal appearance by the Devil. The constant rainfall is oppressive and the scenes involving killings are shot in low-light in wretched huts and agricultural buildings -- there's a great deal of junk crowding the frame. Ordinarily, with the exception of zombie attacks, we don't see any actual killing, just the aftermath of the mayhem. I don't understand the movie on some fundamental level and the whole thing seems merely gratuitous to me. In my estimation the movie's extreme length and the fact that it has several apparent endings (and there was another ending as well, shot but not released) shows that the directorm Na Hong-jin is not in control of this material and doesn't exactly know what he intends.
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