The Wailing

Written and Directed by Na Hong-jin

Horror, Thriller, Comedy?

The Wailing is a horror thriller movie directed and written by Na Hong-jin. The movie is about a police officer who is investigating a strange rash of families being murdered across a village in Korea, with the culprits all being family members covered in a litany of sores, boils, and scabs. As the officer continues his investigation he overhears several rumors about a Japanese man who moved into the mountains just before the murders began, and rushes to solve the mystery when finds his daughter coming down with the same type of sores.

The Wailing is a movie that I personally really enjoyed due to its themes of spirituality and ambiguity in conflicting information. The viewer is almost always given the exact same information the main character is, meaning you as a viewer are almost always left in the dark as to what is going on. You are given information, it is up to you to decide whether it is correct or not, as almost every clue in the movie is either a rumor or acquired through word of mouth. They weren't lying, in case you were curious. There is a LOT of wailing throughout the movie. 

One common custom we all share watching horror movies is telling others what we would do in the main characters situation. We'd say, "Of course we wouldn't go down that dark hallway", or, "No, I think I could have circumvented x by doing y, and the main character should have done that." While you are watching this movie you are reacting to the main characters narrative choices and events with a similar vein of intent. Or at the very least, you understand why the main character would react the way they do. You don't tell the character not to go down that dark hallway, because you and the character both know that at the end of that dark hallway is his family who he needs to reach. The movie uses ambiguity to a great extent to demonstrate the conflicting choices the main character has to make in the story, and is one of the strongest selling points in the movie. In fact, there was an alternative, deleted, ending for this movie which solidifies the intents and actions of a few characters and further clarifies their role in the mystery. I think I agree with the decision to remove this ending, because the audience already has enough information to infer the mysteries conclusion and everyone's role without having it specifically explained. However, even after the conclusion is said and done, and you figure out who did what and what they want, viewers still come to their own separate conclusions for some parts of the movie. (This will be discussed later, after a SPOILER section).

As previously stated, the movie showcases a broad variety of internal beliefs and spiritualism as people try to advise the main character as to what they believe is happening. The two main spiritualities in the movie are Korean shamanism and Christianity; the main character consults with a shaman partway through the movie in an attempt to both exorcise his daughter and kill what he believes may be the source of the towns deaths, while one of the characters is a young deacon who joins the main character to act as a translator for the Japanese man. These characters, the shaman and the deacon, have different views as to what is causing the blight of boils and murders across the town, and the Japanese man. In fact, everyone has their own opinions. Some claim the Japanese man is a demon, others a vampire, or a ghost, or a professor, or criminal. Some tell the main character to cure his daughters illness through an exorcism, others through a doctor, and some believe the illness will be cured through the murder of the aforementioned Japanese man. Everyone has their own idea of what is best, based on their own hearsay; what is the source of the disease and the murders is the point of the mystery. As you might guess, the identity of the Japanese man is a core mystery of the movie. No one really knows who he is, but everyone has some story about him and his existence only brings questions for the main character. 

    

There are some aspects of comedy in the film as well, which surprised me. Usually, horror movies are not done well with comedy; the grittiness of horror does not tend to juxtapose well against a lighthearted comedic moment. This movie, strangely, in a way that I was not expecting does. Comedy does not take up the bulk of the movie or is the centerpiece of the film. But there are humorous moments sprinkled throughout the film and some of the darker sections.

Overall, the Wailing is a great movie; if you are into thriller, horror, mystery, mysticism, and just watching someone who is out of their depth doing the best they can. Many things are left in the background or subtext, or left unsaid, allowing the audience to connect the dots along with the main character. If you ever wanted to know what a Call of Cthulhu RPG game looked like as a movie, where the protagonist persists through a dwindling reserve of fortitude and patience, then this movie is for you.

=========================================================================

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

WARNING: IF YOU PLAN ON WATCHING THIS MOVIE, DON'T READ FURTHER. SERIOUSLY.

THERE IS NOTHING HERE BUT SOME FRAGMENTED THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS OF THE MOVIE.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION AHEAD.

=========================================================================

There is an interesting moment of symbolism with the Japanese man and the shaman during one particular scene of the movie, where both are in the middle of an ritual called a Gut. During this ritual, both sacrifice various animals. However, one detail I noticed about this scene was that the shaman sacrificed white animals while the Japanese man sacrificed black animals. I couldn't find much about the symbolism of this online, but I thought it was a neat detail. 

One of the primary parts of the show is the identity of the Japanese man. At the end of the movie, its revealed that the Japanese man is a demon, and he and the shaman are working together to plague the villagers. This is definitively told to the audience without a doubt. However, there is one scene that disputes the identity of the Japanese man being a demon (or at least, being a demon by the end of the film), that being the Gut scene. If the shaman and demon were working together, why would the shaman target the Japanese man? Why does the Japanese man pray over dead bodies and hold rites for them? In the ending, we see the demon take photos of the priest before presumably killing them, and the shaman taking pictures of the main character before they die, but earlier in the movie the old man takes a photo of a man dead in his car. The old man appears surprised when the presumably dead man turns out to not, in fact, be dead - he is very much alive, and very much trying to eat the main characters face. Throughout the movie, we see the main character's daughter lash out and act aggressive towards her family in what is believed to be a possession. Furthermore, we see the shaman claim to have mistaken who the demon was when he was casting his death hex only AFTER the woman's ghost appears and he personally experiences supernatural phenomenon. The shaman initially tries to flee the village, but only turns back after experiencing supernatural bugs-on-windshield. From this, we can gather two interpretations.

1. The old Japanese man and the shaman were always evil; they were always killing people in the village, both are demons, and both always intended to deceive the main character.

2. The demon is based on possession, and neither the old man or shaman are evil. The reason the death hex strikes the old Japanese man during the ritual is because the old man IS possessed by the demon and likely does not realize this. The shaman later becomes possessed by the demon too and claims that the old man is not possessed to keep one of his bodies safe (for whatever reason).

One final detail I liked was the ending. At the ending the main character must decide between listening to the woman's ghost who says that if he goes to help his family, they will all die, and the shaman (possessed or always evil, you decide) who says the woman's ghost is behind the spree of murders. In this scene, no matter what, the protagonist really can't win. If he went to help his family, he and everyone but his daughter dies. If he didn't, then the ghost's trap to destroy the demon would have likely been used to destroy the demon by killing his daughter (possessed by the demon), and even if it didn't and the daughter lived, the main characters wife and mother-in-law would still have died. One question is "if the old man IS the demon, and is possessing people to bring them under his control and murder others, why also cause a disease that later kills them?. Another question, when the main character asks the woman why his daughter is being possessed he is told that it is because he committed a sin against the demon/Japanese man upon which he replies that his daughter got sick first. I think to a certain extent both of these questions are answered by the idea of the spirit and the demon are "playing" against each other. The main characters daughter gets sick via the spirit to trick the main character into killing the demons main body. The spirit relieves the disease from his daughter, but the demon curses the daughter with the disease in response to being murdered. Or some variation of that. Main summary of this interpretation is that the murders and possessions are being caused by the demon/old man, while the illness and boils are from the woman's ghost who is trying to kill off the demon by destroying those he possesses.

All of this is purely speculative. Watch the movie yourself and come to your own conclusions; this is one movie you cannot really get a definitive answer to as a lot is left up to interpretation. Anyways, those were my two cents.