The Wailing, a supernatural horror film, is about how a quiet South Korean country town suddenly becomes the site of a rash of homicides, and a bumbling cop tries to solve the source of this epidemic before it hurts the ones that he loves. The bumbling cop’s life becomes emblematic of what is happening in his town. He is completely unable to rise to meet the threat, and fear corrupts him. When he does attempt to stop the threat, his transformation becomes tragic and base. He changes from being an ineffectual, but perceptive arm of the law to the head of an ineffectual vengeful, rabble that resorts to increasing illegal actions.
The Wailing does a terrific job of depicting peaceful, bucolic life as it is disturbed by inexplicable acts of evil of a possibly supernatural origin. Is it mushrooms, an unknown sickness that has a rash as a symptom, a faulty product or evil spirits? The Wailing is initially humorous and fun as people whip each other into a frenzy by telling scary stories, but eventually gives in to a sense of foreboding and unrelenting terror as the stories become a part of real life. The idea that evil hijacks those you love to completely defile your home and murder your entire family is a sinister one. The Wailing asks how will you react if you face evil? “How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss?”
I think that something got lost in translation for me as an American Christian viewer of The Wailing. The Wailing shares some of the characteristics of American movies involving demonic possession such as The Exorcist. Considering that The Exorcist TV series also uses demonic possession as a metaphor for rape or sexual child abuse, I think that is the closest analogy that I can make with the threat depicted in The Wailing. I am unfamiliar with how Korean folk religions, including shamanism, views evil, specifically demonic attacks, so I had no independent source of information other than what The Wailing depicted to figure out what was going on. Apparently Na Hong-jin is a self-professed Christian who adheres to a syncretistic practice by combining Christianity with Buddhism as a way to reflect his Asian and Christian identity so I believe that he made a coherent film with a clear plot if you look at the film from that perspective and have some knowledge of East Asian religious practices.
From my perspective, The Wailing was a pastiche of different genres with a strong and beautiful atmosphere, but ultimately not clear in its presentation of certain ambiguous characters until the end. The Wailing improves with repeat viewings, but it is a long movie so that is a bit of a commitment even for such a haunting and emotionally resonant film.
The Wailing reminded me of Shiki, an anime series about a small village suddenly suffering from an epidemic of deaths because of supernatural evil, but I preferred Shiki because the source of evil was something that I understood.
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The Wailing connects possession, zombies, Catholicism, shamanism and a historically rooted dash of fear of the Japanese invader in South Korea, but the connection seemed tenuous and the relationship of these aspects of the story with the (probably) supernatural characters was not coherent. Was the lightning strike supposed to be humorous to get the cop to the hospital or connected to the supernatural atmosphere of The Wailing?
There is a nameless woman dressed in white. I thought that normally white was the color of death in Asian cultures, but righteousness in Christianity. One signal that she is a good character is that she casts stones, which means that she is without sin. She tells the cop that because a family didn’t use a shaman, the family died so indirectly he takes her implicit advice by hiring a shaman whom we wonder if he is an opportunistic exploiter, in evil’s pocket or effective? She spies on the Japanese man as he prepares for his ritual and instills fear in him when she appears. Is she the real reason that the Japanese man convulses in pain and has to stop the ritual? On the other hand, she seems to have the power to fling a grown, but injured man off a mountain so she is no ordinary woman. She terrifies the shaman and makes him violently ill. She can see into the cop’s soul (she tells him about his dreams) and reveals that the shaman and the Japanese man are working together. She asks the cop to trust her and not go home until after the rooster cries three times, i.e. don’t betray good. Then the buffoon cop doesn’t trust her because she has items that all the homicide victims had; however, her warning comes true because he does not heed her so she represents a force of good. IMDB comments suggest that she is a good village spirit.
There is a Japanese guy who lives alone in the forest with the scary dog from the Omen who has the décor sense of a serial killer, complete with a severed black goat head. Crows seem to adore him. He is constantly muttering under his breath. Villagers tell stories of encountering him when his eyes are glowing red, and he is eating animals like a predator. People claim that he is a rapist. The cop dreams that he is attacking him. The unnamed woman says that he is a ghost who wants to drink his victims’ blood, and the shaman says that he is a demon, an evil ghost. A priest suggests that he is just a Buddhist monk. After the cop harasses him, the cop convulses, a black goat is hung bleeding outside his house and his daughter’s condition worsens.
On the other hand, The Wailing depicts the Japanese guy sympathetically like another shaman or a supernatural, traveling investigator who may be using weird methods to fight evil. He enjoys the peace that nature provides as he lives apart from the people who are not that great if you are looking at them as an outsider. They are nothing but gossipers, gluttons and buffoons who violate his civil rights-kill his dog, break into his home and destroy his belongings. He appears at the crime scenes with a look of concern, not pleasure. He doesn’t act like a confident villain, but an investigator more effective than our main character. He appears flustered and frightened as he is victimized and scapegoated. He faces their disdain stoically and silently and never physically defends himself. After he somberly discovers a dead body, he conducts a ritual more modest than the one conducted by the shaman. When a possibly opportunistic shaman casts a spell to kill the evil spirit, his ritual is interrupted. Or was it interrupted by the sudden appearance of the unnamed woman, whom he fears. When he recovers, he seems alarmed and appalled that the dead body isn’t where he originally found it as if he was trying to stop it from animating with his spell. He flees in terror from a lynch mob and then it is implied that the unnamed woman tossed him off the mountain.
The girl briefly recovers after he dies. Of course, anyone who doesn’t die after being flung off a mountain is supernatural so he is not a dehumanized victim. Later he is shown to be in cahoots with the shaman so what was the point of his little shaman ritual? By the end of The Wailing, he transforms into a cackling demon so all the villagers’ accounts are true. IMDB comments suggest that he is a tengu, which I am clueless about even after reading the Wikipedia page. How were flowers supposed to trap him?
A cop’s nephew is a priest who acts as a translator and is completely impotent as a voice of any moral or spiritual authority. He is the most human of all the supernatural characters and is easily bullied by the other characters. He is the most vulnerable to evil attacks. He practically falls into the jaws of a dog and gets bitten by a zombie (different rules so he doesn’t get infected). The blood of Jesus is doing nothing for him, or his uncle who sports a cross, but succumbs to the homicidal plague. He is awkward, thin and weak. The Catholic Church is completely ineffectual in the face of this crisis and completely delegates any solution to science (medicine). The final scenes imply that while the nephew finally understands what is going on, he will become another victim. There is an aboriginal theme in The Wailing that taking someone’s photograph captures his or her soul, which is what the Japanese man does to the priest. (Side note: can we just take a moment to digest the South Korean depiction of the Japanese tourist who is always taking photos and actually turns out to be the devil?)
The shaman is an opportunistic exploiter whose entrance is accompanied by a bombastic, explosive score. He claims to fight evil, but the $10,000 check better clear, and he wears name brand tracksuits and a gold watch. He gives a big show in ceremonial garb using shamanistic rituals. Is he a scam artist using generalities that could be applicable to anyone or actually perceptive? His actions seem to have an actual effect on the Japanese man and the daughter, but later on, it is revealed that he is in league with him as he carries around a box of the Japanese man’s photos and takes photos of the latest victims. His description of the Japanese man as a fisherman, which is how the opening scene of The Wailing depicts him and in a scene when the cop is spending the day with his daughter, is probably the most accurate of any moniker given by other characters. The devil is a type of an anti-Christ, a fisher of men’s souls who likes to mock Jesus complete with the Luke 24: 37-39 reference and the holes in his hand.
The shaman is his elegant Renfield, who financially benefits from being in league with the devil. He vomits and gets uncontrollable nosebleeds when he encounters the unnamed woman then flees in terror. What extinguishes his candle, causes a crow to crash into his room and a plague of locusts to attack his car? Is it his boss telling him to man up and do his damn job because he is not dead after all? He tells the cop that the unnamed woman is the demon so he won’t trust her, which leads to the entire family’s death.
What is most confusing for me is the allegation that the sins of the father are visited upon his child even before they are committed? That is not a Christian concept. The Wailing rightfully condemns his lynching impulses, but it seems that there were plenty of sins before that: he was spectacularly derelict in his duty. His daughter got sick long before the lynching. I preferred the allusion to the randomness of fishing as if this could happen to any one instead of it being a punishment.