Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A stranger arrives in a little village and soon after a mysterious sickness starts spreading. A policeman is drawn into the incident and is forced to solve the mystery in order to save his daughter.
The Wailing is a singular achievement in folk horror — a sprawling, emotionally devastating mystery that layers shamanism, Christian demonology, and Japanese horror tropes into something genuinely unique. Na Hong-jin's direction is masterful, the cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo is stunning (rain-soaked rural landscapes, visceral chaos), and the ensemble acting — particularly Kwak Do-won's frantic everyman and Hwang Jung-min's electric shaman — is exceptional. The film's radical novelty lies in how it fuses genres and refuses tonal consistency, cycling between dark comedy, procedural thriller, and pure horror. The ending is deliberately, fascinatingly ambiguous — structurally audacious but also genuinely divisive and arguably unsatisfying in its refusal to cohere, earning it a slight demerit even as its ambiguity is partly the point.