Critics reviews

For two and a half gripping hours, Hong-jin Na holds the viewer in the sweaty palm of his hand in telling his endlessly inventive tale of possession, murder, and the occult. One of the year's best horror films, this Korean supernatural policier cum domestic drama (with a little zombie flick thrown in) builds to an unforgettable conclusion, with imagery designed to haunt dreams.

The film's byzantine plot keeps spiraling out of control at regular intervals. What Na's got, though, is a knack for the sorts of sticky, lingering images that can make a wildly uneven film feel hugely unnerving: an early dream sequence featuring a bestial, red-eyed old man feeding on a deer is the sort of thing that can lodge in one's memory banks.

There are some absolutely dazzling sequences, most notably a shamanistic ritual attempting to cure the cop's daughter of her possession, where Na's ability to cross-cut and create a hypnotic rhythm while also amplifying the tension and horror is truly remarkable. Also, the story is able to draw on both Christian and traditionally Korean shamanistic traditions and combine them with the history of Japanese colonialism to create its morbid atmosphere.

Na suggests that the town's seemingly collective xenophobia is misguided but then confirms it is not, which gives this otherwise ingenious probe of religion and superstition an unfortunate taint of isolationist propaganda. Still, the film justifies its epic length, meshing ancient east Asian mythology and rituals with more recognizable horror tropes (demonic possession, zombification, the devil represented by a black dog and rams' heads) in a way that feels novel and unpredictable.

...Some viewers may well be willing to go along with any, or all of these, and Na's willingness to "go there"—in a way that, say, the producers of True Detective season one were finally too timorous to try—underlines the excitement that goes along with a filmmaker stretching himself to the limit, even if his attempts at metaphysical sleight of hand are finally an example of reach exceeding grasp.

This ferociously full-tilt horror-mystery hybrid carries echoes aplenty from the Western horror canon, with nods to The Exorcist, The Shining (in a mesmeric aerial shot following a car along a twisty, lushly forested mountain road), and Poltergeist—if only because The Wailing echoes that film's accumulative frenzy, crazily piling up one damned (and I do mean damned) thing after another... The Wailing's world is a messy mire of excess, but beautifully precise with it.

The Wailing" has echoes of "The Exorcist," but it is often even bleaker than that 1973 horror classic, as in a scene in which a Catholic priest tells Jong-gu, "The church cannot help you." By this time, I was so invested with Jong-gu and his family that as the suspense, violence and worse ratcheted up, I was not merely scared, but heartbroken. An overly literal bit of business at the end slightly undermines the film. As a whole, though, "The Wailing" is the hard stuff. Handle with care.

A witch's brew that trusts its ambiguities will carry the day, though the spell occasionally slips from the mesmeric into the tedious. (Na can't entirely eradicate the staleness of the is-it-a-dream-or-not? fakeout.) Yet there's real beauty and devastation in the film's finale, as the harrowing father-daughter relationship between Jong-gu and Hyo-jin reaches its apex—one that's quite literally sanguine and is chillingly accompanied by the got-another-one! giggling of the Good Book's oldest foe.

Na makes the familiar sight of postmortem crime scenes disturbing again by painting them in more blood than a Quentin Tarantino–directed episode of Hannibal, complete with glimpses of the ritual sacrifices that precede them. The result is both a high-minded zombie flick and a visceral lament for broken family bonds.

Na is an atmospheric reveler who sets his narrative traps so gradually that we come to accept his increasingly insane plot as inevitable. He's at once fashioned a hangout movie, luxuriating in the eccentricities of the village locals, and a relentlessly precise and momentous supernatural thriller, with two ingenious climaxes that each juxtapose dueling interrogations, revealing men to exhibit little grasp of the world that engulfs them.

The plot makes no logical sense whatsoever, but Na's masterful use of suspense and gore will have audiences on tenterhooks for the entirety of its 156-minute duration.