CAPSULE: The Wailing (2016, Dir. Na Hong-jin)

Don’t fuck with the paranormal. That’s the take-away from Na Hong-jin’s sprawling two and a half hour one-upping of The Exorcist. More than even that seminal horror, The Wailing (Goksung) keeps the unknown unknown. And that goes for its bumbling protagonists and its audience. Shit’s going down and there is no way you’re going to be in control of it.

Local police sergeant, Jeon Jong-gu (Kwak Do-won) gives it a fair crack. He’s called to a murder scene in his small village. A young man, covered in blood and boils, eyes rolled back in his head, has stabbed and burnt his family. It is a messy scene and Jong-gu spends most of his investigation with his eyes wide, his jaw open and his knees giving way. He regains some composure, though, and as similar events begin to pop up around the village his half-arsed investigation begins to congeal around a Japanese hermit who has moved into the area.

So far so recognisable. Na take some fairly standard horror tropes, layers them over police procedural and fastens them with some institution-deprecating comedy.

But he doesn’t stop there. The Wailing bleeds around the edges. It keeps spreading. It keeps collecting more disparate elements. It keeps deepening its use of those it has already employed. The horror gets bloodier. The moods get moodier. The comedy gets broader then more uncomfortable. And, finally, when Jong-gu’s young daughter, Hyo-jin (Kim Hwan-hee), is drawn into the homicidal illness, the film begins to tighten.

What at first seems haphazard begins to gain purpose. Na's film relies heavily on this lack of narrative focus to build sense of the unexpected, and ultimately the unknowable. In Jong-gu he gives his audience equal footing with his unwillingly credulous hero, which is to say very shaky. He is a protagonist bereft of the cold analytical presence of the genre's usual players. Instead, he is as petrified as any of us would be in a similar situation, police sergeant or no. As Jong-gu is pushed towards the centre of the paranormal shitstorm, flanked by local drinking buddies and a cock-sure shaman (Hwang Jeong-min), he grows a spine but he's no more wise to the forces buffeting the village. He is flailing against ghosts.

This lack of clarity imbues The Wailing with a penetrating fatalistic horror. Religion, the community's general line of defence against the blackness of inevitability is no help. Here, both Hwang's mercenary shaman and the local Christian priest are dead-ends or dissemblers. Refuge within the family is also, clearly, not an option. The police are useless. And shifting the blame to outsiders only throws everyone further into the grips of evil. Ultimately, everyone is left alone to face a choice, blind, with devastating consequences.

Nobody can win against that.

★★★★

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