I watch a lot of YouTube videos related to film criticism, and sometimes I get a good recommendation from those. One such recommendation that I actually found more than once was for the Korean horror movie The Wailing. I had a rough idea what it was about, and that was about all. Besides, Parasite was my favorite movie for 2019. I should maybe check out more Korean cinema if I liked the ones I’ve seen as much as I have.
As it is, The Wailing is included for free from Amazon Prime, and once I figured out how to turn the subtitles on, I got to enjoy the movie.
In a small Korean village, local cop Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won) is called in to assist in crowd control around a house, the site of a brutal murder. A local farmer apparently went insane and violently murdered his wife of many years. The man’s uncle is screaming his nephew would never do such a thing while the man himself, covered in a bizarre rash and covered in soot, sits alone and defeated on his front porch. Things get a little stranger from there as other residents of the village also develop rashes and violently kill their loved ones before dying themselves. Is this some kind of plague? A curse? Something else?
To make matters worse for Jong-goo, his young daughter (Kim Hwan-hee) seems to be the next person infected. There are various suspects, if you can call them suspects, in the form of a mysterious woman in white whose name in Korean translates to “no name” (Chun Woo-hee) and a Japanese man (Jun Kunimura) that the locals don’t trust anyway. Even with the help of a shaman-for-hire (Hwang Jung-min), can Jung-goo get to the bottom of this case before the worst happens?
Now, I don’t know a lot about Korean horror or cinema in general, but if The Wailing is anything to go by, it’s not much like American horror. I didn’t expect it to be, but I didn’t know how different it would be. As a movie, it plays more like a light comedy in the beginning. Jong-goo isn’t exactly a brilliant detective or anything. He’s a run-of-the-mill uniformed cop, given jobs like watching crime scenes and keeping crowds away from police business. He doesn’t seem very bright, and much of the beginning of the movie shows him being henpecked by his wife and mother-in-law while adoring his daughter. The movie lacks gore or jumpscares, instead going for atmosphere and dread. The movie seems to see horror more in tragedy caused by forces beyond the control or understanding of the characters.
Ultimately, the movie falls down to Jong-goo needs to decide who to trust and listen to when presented with various options on who can save his daughter and, by extension, the rest of his family. The ending does provide some answers for what happened, but really, this is more about how what may be spiritual dumb luck can bring sorrow and tragedy to regular mortals. If that is what Korean horror is, I may have to look into more of it.
Grade: A
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