A stranger arrives in a quiet mountain village outside Gokseong, and soon after, its residents start turning on their families with a violence no one can explain.
Police officer Jong-goo is dragged into the investigation almost by accident, treating it as routine until his own daughter begins showing the same symptoms. Na Hong-jin sets up a problem that keeps changing shape under the audience, a rash outbreak, a curse, a possession, each explanation arriving just credible enough to replace the last.
Na Hong-jin wrote and directed the film after two very different genre pictures, the serial-killer thriller The Chaser and the crime drama The Yellow Sea, and he built The Wailing to deliberately blur genre lines rather than settle into one: bumbling comic policing giving way to possession horror giving way to something closer to folk ritual, to keep viewers off balance about what kind of story they were watching.
The film keeps trust and doubt in play with real deliberateness: nearly every character who claims to know what is happening gives the audience a different account, and the film refuses to hand viewers a stable authority to believe. That refusal is the mechanism of its dread. The 156-minute length works because Na uses the extra time to let procedural scenes curdle slowly into something stranger.
The Wailing premiered out of competition at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Na Hong-jin's third selection there, and received a lengthy standing ovation at its gala screening. Check PLOT's listing for the title closer to your watch time to confirm what's currently streaming or available to rent in your area, especially given the film's length.
