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Notes -
I watched a movie that I thought was awesome recently and I want to talk about it. The Wailing is a Korean horror film from 2016 my brother told me to watch, with the explicit instruction to tell him who I was think the villain was. Obviously him telling me that put me on alert (it was a 'hey you'll get a kick out of this' type request, not a 'good lord that made no sense at all' request), but I am now going to do the same to you, because having watched it twice now, I'm still not sure who brought the curse,but the more I think about it the more I conclude that the general consensus is just wrong.
See the movie is about a cop, Jong-Goo, living in a sleepy rural town in Korea (played exceptionally by Kwak Do-won), who notices his community falling apart after a stranger arrives followed by an affliction that drives people homicidal. When his daughter starts showing symptoms he becomes desperate to stop it, but he doesn't even know where to start looking for answers. He mostly tries to get them from the people associated with the crimes, including a mysterious young woman dressed in white who keeps turning up nearby. It's a good allegory for germ theory, but there's a lot more to the film than that.
Faith is probably the main theme of the film, and multiple religions are called in, with Buddhism, Catholicism and the folk religion of Korea all playing a major role as the protagonist tries to find a solution to an apparently supernatural issue. The Korean shaman (Hwang Jung-Min nailing it) performs an exorcism and good gravy if you think Christian exorcisms are insane and scary you are in for a treat. I was surprised to learn the director Na Hong-jin was a devout Christian, because the film inverts the typical western perception of Catholicism - whereas typically these days in the west the church is portrayed as frightening and strange and not fully in touch with reality, in The Wailing it is the source of reason - the catholic priest is the only religious person in the movie who tells him to trust the doctors and the hospital. Given there is absolutely a supernatural element in the film though, it positions Catholicism as the least useful religion of the three. There are also direct references to scripture in the film, specifically it begins with an epigraph of Luke 24:37–39 - They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
It's a fantastic film that I highly recommend if you don't mind downer endings - and now I feel like I've revealed too much, so if it sounds like your thing and you haven't seen it yet stop reading this post and go watch it. If you have seen it already though I'd love to discuss it, because my favourite thing about it is thatthere is quite a bit of evidence suggesting the obvious conclusion (that the Japanese monk was an evil demon helped by the Korean shaman for some reason) is wrong, and the girl in white was indeed responsible. But I'm not sure that's right either.
I was primed to look, but it was the scripture references that first made me think something was up. At first, knowing nothing about the director (or Korean culture really) I ignorantly thought it was an esl type thing - the foreign director wants to reference Christianity somehow, saw a passage mentioning ghosts and went with it (sort of like how Osgood Perkins jammed T. Rex into longlegs). But it is referenced again later in the film by the girl in white and by that point in the film I had seen too much self-awareness to accept my original assumption about the use of scripture, I'd already started beating myself up for it. It was too on the nose, I just couldn't accept that this apparently clever film was now going to make the girl in white a christ figure by having her actually quote Jesus. When Jong-goo denies her three times before the cock crows I realised I had it completely back to front. The Christian symbolism is a deliberate subversion, part of the film's attempt to prime the audience to trust the girl in white and give the appearance of a twist.
The girl in white is definitely supernatural - she reads minds, has telepathy and ultimately must have control over time itself if she is telling the truth, as she tells him she wants to save his family, but they are mostly dead before he gets back home. But his she evil? Her emotions seem genuine, and she has a very apathetic attitude to villainy if we're seeing how she operates. The Japanese stranger (the ever popular Jun Kunimura) is definitely doing something weird and creepy - whether they're covered in blood and barbed wire or clean, he's taking secret photos of the dead. But is he evil, is he really a friggin oni? Once again he has a very laconic approach if he is. And don't forget that The Jap (a term I didn't expect to see in a movie again) was right about the deacon, he had already made up his mind about the stranger and we already know that the curse can make normal things seem monstrous. And the shaman definitely appears to be corrupt and ineffective at best - his exorcism fails, he charges exorbitant fees for his services and pinpoints the stranger as responsible while also apparently working with him. But once again, some of his actions are pretty dumb if he is evil. He explains the mechanics of the curse to Jong-goo and puts himself in harm's way during the exorcism, and he seems genuinely terrified and out of his depth at the end.
I know it's a cop out, but my read is it is the paralysis of ambiguity that is the real villain of The Wailing. That's what makes it so brilliant - the girl in white, the Japanese stranger, the shaman - all are red herrings, bringing that paralysis out of the screen and into our hearts. Jong-goo's desperation mirrors our own as viewers, every clue is a double edged sword, every act of faith a potential misstep. The girl in white quotes scripture not to subvert or emulate Christ, but to instill the seed of doubt in the viewer's mind.
So my question for you motters is this - what would you do in Jong-goo's shoes?
Dude, thanks for reminding me about The Wailing. Watched it on a random Netflix Saturday Night years ago, thinking it would be some sort of Ju-On knockoff that would help pass the time.
Absolute power banger of a film. The final ending gave me legit horror move "I am fucking scared" vibes I hadn't felt since watching OG Exorcist when I was 12 or something.
I think your post - in its entirety - is the "right" answer. This film is doubt and doubt on multiple levels. Forget "who's the bad guy", do we even know what the fuck actually happened? I think an interesting comparison to make would be No Country for Old Men. On the surface, it's a really good neo-noir-western with a hero Cowboy protagonist assisted by the grizzled elder sheriff. Unfortunately, our hero just runs out of time and luck.
Right? Maybe not. Maybe the whole pont of NCFOM is that all of the action - the chase scenes, the cleverness of the protagonist, the one-step-behind earnestness of the sheriff - is actually totally pointless. The universe scale forces of fate and end consequences of seemingly insignificant actions are as inescapable as they are unknowable. "What do I have running on this coin toss?" "Everything." What actually happened in that movie? Maybe nothing. The ending is notoriously abrupt and follows a soliloquy that, although vivid, sort of has no point. It is as if the movie itself is telling us "nothing happened in this move and you knew the end before you walked in - which is that there is nothing in the end."
The Wailing does this by confronting us, at first, with a good-vs-evil doubt situation. But the more times you watch it the more you start to think, "Can I even tell good an evil apart? Do I have any coherent plan for 'stopping' or 'fighting' evil if I think I've confronted it?" It's doubt on top of doubt so that once you simply reconcile yourself to taking a leap of faith on one plane, you are immediately confronted with a whole never world of doubt on another one.
But I could be wrong.
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The Wailing is one of my favourite movies all the time, and the closest movie to it is the original Wicker Man from 1973. Same as the Wailing, it kind of relies on spoilers, so I won't say much more than that. It also has an amazing ost. One of the songs in has been sampled in some modern electronics albums.
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Stopped reading this halfway through because I want to watch it. Will get back to you.
Good, good.
I'm going to watch two of Na Hong-jin's other films tonight with some friends - The Yellow Sea, a crime drama also featuring Kwak Do-won, and The Medium, a Thai horror mockumentary, I have high hopes.
The Medium is fun, but nowhere as good as the Wailing. Closer to a traditional horror movie. Still worth a watch.
Yeah The Medium was fun, especially the end where it dials it up to 11, but not even in The Wailing's zip code. Have you watched The Yellow Sea though? Now that's a downer ending. It follows a young deadbeat gambler living in the Joseon region whose wife went to work in Korea but hasn't been in contact since she left, filling him with paranoid fears of her cheating or being killed. After meeting a mob boss he is contracted to go to Korea to kill a professor, and upon completion he'll get enough money to bring his wife home. But absolutely nothing goes to plan because nobody involved can be trusted, so after a series of double crosses he decides to get revenge. It's a bit too long and complicated, but I think that's more due to the language and cultural barriers, as following so many moving parts in a complicated political situation I am largely ignorant of - plus a complicated social situation on top - while also reading all the dialogue gets overwhelming around the two hour mark, and then you still have half an hour to go. You can still follow what's going on, but it's exhausting. Or maybe I just feel drained from the after credits scene, God damn.
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