MAY 20 - The Wailing

            It’s sheer coincidence that I put The Wailing, a secret possession film but also so much more, on my schedule right after The Exorcist III. Like that movie, it also starts a police procedural investigating a series of bizarre crimes that all seem to have different perpetrators. And like Train to Busan, another Korean film from the same year that I watched for the first International Horror Wednesday, it follows a father’s desperate struggle to save his daughter. But that’s where the similarities end. The Wailing is a singular film, unlike any film I’ve watched in this lineup and maybe any other film I’ve seen, despite its surface similarities to other horror flicks.

            In the charming Korean village of Gokseong, a rash of horrible crimes have been taking place. Ordinary members of the community go berserk and kill their families, and are found at the scene in hideous condition. The local police are doing their very best to take it in stride. Police officer Jong-goo thinks a mysterious Japanese man who has just arrived in town may be behind the strange events. But who is the mysterious woman in white who keeps sneaking around the scenes of the crime? Jong-goo soon finds himself in a cosmic battle between good and evil, death and life, and his young daughter, Hyo-jin, is the latest battleground. Jong-goo struggles to know who to trust, with deception around every corner.

            American horror fans will recognize all kinds of subgenres in The Wailing – ghosts, zombies, a touch of vampires, heaps of possession horror, demons, contagion horror, folk horror, it’s all here. But The Wailing never commits to one script, which makes it a thrilling, unpredictable watch. So many times I gasped out loud as something happened that just wasn’t right. There’s a deep sense of wrongness here. This movie is long, especially for a horror movie, but that runtime means it can take its time, lingering in the discomfort, letting exciting scenes whip us into a frenzy, or filling us with mounting dread as Jong-goo learns more about his terrible predicament.

            With The Wailing, the viewer is never on certain ground – not just because neither the viewer nor Jong-goo is ever quite sure what’s happening, but because there are no reliable forms of authority. Unlike your typical possession film, there’s no religious leader waiting in the wings to make everything right. Jong-goo turns to the Church only to get a shrug. As his daughter worsens, he seeks aid from a shaman, who is indeed powerful but also deeply fallible. When the police investigation stalls, Jong-goo is quick to turn to law-breaking investigations, and then vigilante justice, to protect his family and community, to mixed results. Even Jong-goo is an unlikely hero; terrified, sometimes bumbling, often late, the laughing-stock of his superior, but unwavering in his devotion to saving his daughter. But one of the central themes of The Wailing is the failure of those authorities, so once things start to unravel, they fall apart quickly, and poor Jong-goo is in way over his head.

He tries, bless him

            I must warn you, this movie gets bleak. There have been many downer endings in this line-up and I hesitate to rank them. But this one, it’s up there.

            What’s incredible about this movie, though, for all the frights and awfulnesses, is that we always get the sense that we’re only seeing a tiny bit of what’s going on. I wouldn’t quite call it epic, despite its lengthy runtime – its focus is too tight for that – but it does feel cosmic. This is a movie about forces that are outside its human characters purview, that they can only struggle to understand. Not to bring it back to The Exorcist again but I always felt like possession movies that subscribe to a specific theology, usually Catholicism, become less frightening by containing their monsters. They are understandable. There are answers. That’s not how The Wailing works. And it’s all the scarier for it.

An exorcism - without the dreary Latin

           

Vibecheck: Starts out like a particularly well-produced crime drama where something is just a little…off. There are some beautiful shots of the Korean countryside here. There are hideous things too.

Scare Factor: This movie nails a creeping sense of dread better than just about anything I’ve watched this month.

Pairs Well With: Comparing things to Twin Peaks always feels a little weird since making knock-off Twin Peakses is something of a TV cottage industry. And The Wailing isn’t interested in making its small town excessively charming. But it does have a similar brand of cosmic horror, a struggle between good and evil where the human characters are just somewhere in-between.

But how gay is it?: In Jong-goo’s haphazard attempts at heroism, we could view this as a parable of failed masculinity, though it’s a lot more than that. But any queerness remains deeply buried.

Girlfriend’s Corner: Generally, I’m okay with possession narratives involving young children much more than I am okay with any other narrative that implies harm coming to said children. Obviously, having your body taken over by a creature from the beyond is harmful, and the kid usually then goes on to harm others, but… shrug? The kids generally wind up okay in the end? (It’s also that the possession narrative is among the horror tropes easiest for trans people to reclaim as our own.)

            Anyway, despite that, I’m glad I didn’t watch this movie! It sounds very stressful. Instead of watching it, I played some Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on my family’s Switch. I play Breath of the Wild in a sort of weird way: I try to avoid having to fight any monsters or killing any animals for meat, so it winds up just being Link wandering around the mountains, picking flowers and trying to pet wolves and stuff. It is gentle and fun!