At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, internationally renowned Korean auteur Park Chan-wook dished out “The Handmaiden,” slicing critical opinion down the middle (we loved it), but in a darker, slightly seedier, much more fantastically and no-holds-barred entertaining way, a younger Korean director showed his splendid colors too. The country’s multi-genre cauldron boils intensely in Na Hong-jin‘s “The Wailing” — his third feature after the critically acclaimed noirish treats “The Yellow Sea” and “The Chaser” — which sees chaos descend upon a bucolic village near Gokseong County in Korea. Told from the perspective of a petrified detective who finds his courage along the way (he’d make a great Lion in “The Wizard Of Oz“) the film is a bullet train of laughs, gore, frights and folklore, making the two-and-a-half hour runtime feel like a couple of minutes. Blink and you might miss the whole thing.
READ MORE: Cannes Review: Park Chan-wook’s Gorgeous, Silly, Fun, Sexy ‘The Handmaiden’
Jong-gu (Kwak Do-won, firing on all cylinders) is a humble police officer who lives with his darling wife, cranky mom, and endearing six-year-old daughter. A series of gruesome murders pulls him out of his haphazard attitude towards his job after he gets called in for the first of many horrendously violent crime scenes. The man who committed the murder sits on a porch, looking like a burnt crisp, with maggots crawling out of his cracked skull. Kim Sun-min‘s editing and Jang Young-gyu‘s booming score send chills down our spines, but Jong-gu’s authentic repulsion and terrified screams bring in welcome humor. It’s the first in a handful of cases in where we’ll be uncomfortably laughing and wincing at the same time during “The Wailing.” A Japanese stranger (Jun Kunimura, with expressions worth a thousand words) ambiguously appears around the crime scenes, which continue to pile up and become increasingly bizarre. Once the village gossips start spreading, Jong-gu and his partner continue their investigation, the atmosphere gets perceptibly icky with the supernatural. A visit to the hospital opens up our and Jong-gu’s eyes to the hellish spirit that seems to be possessing these people and turning them into murderous monsters.
It’s not until Jong-gu’s adorable daughter gets possessed by the same spirit that “The Wailing” ups the ante. Beating his cowardice with a father’s love and protection, Jong-gu makes it his mission to get to the bottom of what’s going on by any means necessary. This includes employing a shaman (Hwang Jung-min) to cast a hex on the evil spirit (believed to be the mysterious Japanese man who lives alone and in creepy fashion in the nearby forest) and gathering a little posse to face whatever fear lies in their path.
Na Hong-jin’s use of black humor in this film can’t be stressed enough, especially since it’s one of the biggest ways his latest departs from his previous two films. Whether he’s having a nightmare, stumbling backward from sheer terror or getting chastised by an eyewitness right before lightning strikes said witness, Kwak Do-won’s Jong-gu is a boisterous barrel of hilarity. And all credit goes to Kwak’s ability to switch from something like “Benny Hill“-type slapstick into seriously dark territory as a vengeful father out of his element. A key shift occurs during an extremely loud sequence with the shaman when the hex is being cast and Jong-gu watches his daughter writhing in pain but feels paralyzed, unsure who is wailing: his daughter or the demon inside her. Stories around the village talk of blood-sucking monsters; corpses get reanimated in a scene that was designed for midnight-crowd applause; and the shaman is convinced that the Stranger is no man at all, but an evil ghost intent on preying on the innocent. “The Wailing” keeps you on constant, nail-chewing edge by using the fear of the unknown and anchoring real emotions in an obscure and tumultuous sea of unpredictability. It’s deliciously entertaining stuff.
Looking for a point and thematic understanding — especially as the film nears its conclusion and the director capriciously throws us through several loops (something of a trademark by now) — will result in banging your head against a concrete wall. “The Wailing” storms into that category of visceral genre film experiences that’s all about the immediacy of what’s happening on screen. Its gorgeous locales are sumptuously shot by Bong Joon-ho‘s go-to DP Hong Kyung-pyo and the ghastly make-up from Kim Seo-young will nestle itself into your mind like a worm tunneling through an apple. Beyond that the film doesn’t resonate too deeply. Sit through it, though, and you’ll be left breathless from the whirlwind of nightmares, demons, ghosts, zombies, folk tales, gags, family bonds, grizzly murders and occultist rituals the movie throws at you. Na Hong-jin’s remarkable ability in managing to keep it all balanced and feel harmonious safely places him in the front lines of genre cinema. [B+]
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