The Wailing (2016)

Horror is the least preferred genre for me, as most of them revolves around same story lines and forced " jumpy " moments, so this is perhaps my very few amongst the horror flicks for which I am motivated to write a small review because of its awesomeness. The tension that builds in this movie is really terrifying and will stick with you for a while. I literally had a nightmare the same night after watching this movie; such was its effect. I think, the emotional struggle of a father and the sheer determination to fight the odds to help his child was captured beautifully. Also, there is a certain intangible weirdness in this movie that makes it really unique, served with some brilliant acting. I recommend everyone to stay away from the spoilers and just watch the movie. It is hell of a ride if you allow yourself submerge into the plot.

Another masterpiece from Korean cinema. A must watch for horror fans.

Fmovies: Wow, it was one of the greatest movies I've seen in years. It gave me chills and maintained it all along for the two hours and thirty minutes - I don't even remember how the time passed! I didn't expect to see this low rating (7.X is a bit lower than I expected). However, it is not surprising to see there is also a negative review. If you are a movie-goer who needs to clarify every movie under a single genre and doesn't like to think but just like to see the clear start-clear ending, this is not the movie for you. But if you like to think and love to find/collect evidences to think ahead and derive the director's intentions and if you want to see a new occult movie, this is the movie for you. If you pay attention, things would lead you to the right direction and that is the beauty of the movie!! Another masterpiece from Director Na and I can tell you that this movie is the greatest of all his movies!!

SPOILER: This review is extremely difficult to pen without dropping spoilers, but I am going to try...

Na Hong-jin's The Chaser (2008) audaciously broke one of cinema's golden rules to heartbreaking effect. His sophomore effort The Yellow Sea (2010) is a pulsating rush of blood and bone. 6 years later comes The Wailing, a gruesome blend of different genres and it is near impossible to pigeonhole. Na Hong-jin has graduated to a whole new level with The Wailing, a smorgasbord of investigative procedural, humour, horror, supernatural, family drama, and near un-killable zombies.

Whether you are the filmmaker or the viewer, it can be really hard to start a film. No one sitting in the pitch-black cinema is your friend yet and the beginning of any film always feels like a forced act of intimacy for the viewer. A hooker can help. No, I don't mean a prostitute but a good first scene 😬. The Wailing opens with a verse from the Bible, Luke 24:38-39 and cuts to a scene of a forlorn man double hooking a worm before fishing from a boulder. The scene is beguiling, laden with an atmosphere of dread and your consciousness will immediately lock in the little noggin of information that his unusual act has a higher purpose. Two and a half hours later and after a post-movie long table discussion with 13 other animated persons and more than a day of further discussion on a WhatsApp chat group, I am wiser. The first scene of The Wailing is a blue-ribbon winner and so it goes for the rest of the film.

The big story is easy - a Japanese stranger (Jun Kunimura) arrives in a little village and soon a mysterious sickness starts to spread. Grisly murders ensue and a strange young woman (Chun Woo-Hee) and a bombastic shaman (Hwang Jung-Min) enter into the fray. A bumbling and lazy policeman (Kwak Do Won) is drawn in and he has to get to the crux of the mystery in order to save his daughter. It is the intricate workings of the plot that needs a lot of unpacking. Forget about the age-old Hollywood adage that a good film has a plot that is easily summarised. The last time I had so much fun dismantling and assembling back a movie was Inception!

The Wailing is a stupendous and sustained piece of masterful storytelling. It is loaded with frightful incidents and stuffed with mystifying characters. On top of that, it is genuinely terrifying as it preys on the goodness of ordinary people. God has seemingly excused Himself from the battleground as can be gleaned from a scene in which the church says it will not lift a finger to help. The story is compelling and riveting, and every twist, turn and outcome totally earned. The movie has a punishing runtime of 156 minutes not because of poor pacing, but because of the intricacies of the plot. There are plenty of bloody scenes for the gore-hounds but they are never ladled out to pump up a sagging plot. The plot never sags, not even for one instance. Na's use of music and sounds to heighten the suspense is brilliant. From plaintive tonal chords in the beginning to a full-blown thunderous "tong tong qiang" exorcism ritual, everything adds to the atmosphere of doom. Na has also achieved such sublime tonal shifts that I didn't even notice where I went from laughing out loud to pure heart-parked-in-my-mouth terror. The film is suffused with motifs, religious overtones and thematically rich. Even an innocuous scene of a young woman throwing stones has biblical weight. The storytelling is powerful and the twists perfectly angled into the story. So many times I had th

The Wailing fmovies. I expected this to be a slow pace,d very atmospheric horror film. Instead, I was surprised by how crazy and intense it is. It never really allows you to completely wrap your head around it because it is constantly pulling the rug from under you. The cast does a great job from verging in both drama, horror, and even comedy, which the film is able to balance with the other genres very well, for the most part. Because of that the film sometimes feels a little messy and a little jumbled in its very ambitious aims, and as a result it suffers. I wouldn't call it a great film, but I do recommend it simply for the sheer effort and ambition on display here. Certainly a horror film to remember.

This will be the first review i'm writing, Because i'm enthralled by this piece of art. Gokseong is directed by Hong-jin Na who previously have made very fine movies like yellow sea and chaser. But the setting of this movie is different from those movies, It kind of felt like Memories of Murder in darker tone. This is the story of a village, where people are suffering from a mysterious diseases which seems like some kind of virus and this ends up killing them, and in the middle of somewhere a Japanese stranger seems to be involved in this. Now, i'm not going to say more than that about the story , and i suggest you to not watch the trailer which doesn't do justice to the movie and stay away from any possible spoiler. It is one of the best horror movies i have seen in long time, it doesn't have jump scares. But what this movie does, it slowly grows on you, you will be confused, conflicted, disgusted while watching this. Somewhere you will make a choice, a perspective to the way things are going and possibly will be wrong. So i strongly suggest you to watch this movie if possible in a secluded environment and if possible alone. P.S.- It has the what i think is the best exorcism scene shown in any movie.

Director Na, Hong-jin catapulted himself into the Korean directing elite with his much lauded debut movie, The Chaser, back in 2008. His follow-up, The Yellow Sea, received more tepid response, but there was little doubt that here was a movie-maker who had the potential to be spoken of in the same sentence as Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. His latest, The Wailing, starts with more than a passing resemblance to Bong's masterpiece, Memories of Murder. There's a series of grisly, unexplained murders in a backward-looking (although in The Wailing's case contemporary) countryside, which is then investigated by ordinary cops – more put-upon locals in uniform than law enforcers – increasingly out of their depth. What appears first as simple murders of passion begins to spread across the village, while an increasing number of people fall victim to a violent – and violence-inducing – fever, including the young daughter of one of the policemen on the case, Jong- gu. A portly every-man and a doting father, he is bewildered by the severity of the crimes (especially so in a hitherto tranquil countryside) and heart-broken by his daughter's sudden affliction. Desperate to find a cure, Jong-gu (played by Kwak, Do-won, a Na alumnus from Yellow Sea) and his friends latch onto the fact that the fever seemingly started after an unknown Japanese man appeared in the area. The more they delve into the stranger (Jun Kunimura, best known for getting decapitated by Lucy Liu in Kill Bill), the more Jong-gu realizes that the situation may belong more in the realms of the unnatural. Enlisting the help of a charismatic shaman, Jong-gu goes to the extremes to find a solution. Fittingly for the fishing motif that's so prevalent in the film, however, the more he bites at the problem, the more he seems to be ensnared.

It's been a while since a Korean film had this kind of craftsmanship and artistic control to match its ambition. In many ways The Wailing is the true successor to the class of 2003 – when A Tale of Two Sisters and Oldboy as well as the aforementioned Memories of Murder were released – with how confidently the visuals are displayed, the themes are interwoven, and the story unfolds. The forebodingly beautiful cinematography nods at Kubrick, the acting is exemplary (including a worryingly remarkable turn from the child actress Kim, Hwan-hee as Jong-gu's daughter), and most of all the atmosphere of escalating horror that Na captures is impressively unsavoury indeed. The film is a bold departure (or throwback, depending on how you look at it) for Korean cinema in its heavy emphasis on the occult, a theme more associated in the country with the well-worn moralism of its ghost stories and the oft-parodied rituals of harlequin-esque shamans. At well over two and a half hours, The Wailing is a hefty movie, but with its potent mixture of procedural mystery, black comedy and a prevailing sense of dread, it commands attention masterfully for much of the duration.

The one drawback for the film is a significant one that takes the shine off what could otherwise have been a landmark movie. During the course of the film Na throws a number of questions and macguffins up in the air. Who or what is causing the fever? Can the shaman be trusted? Is the Japanese stranger a victim of xenophobia? Who is the nameless girl always hovering around the crime scenes? Or is it all just collective hallucination caused by bad mushrooms? The Wailing takes its twists and turns, apparently answering the questions and overturning ex