In the pantheon of Korean possession-horror media, director Na Hong-jin’s 2016 film The Wailing (Goksung) shares an uncanny kinship with another slept-on entry in the genre. Sure, it’s got the usual fixings: a doe-eyed hero, a cynical side character not long for this world, a wise shaman, some sort of demon, and the unlucky family member the protagonist is tasked with saving from spiritual ruin. But like Jang Jae-hyun’s 2024 film Exhuma, The Wailing takes these familiar hallmarks and injects them with real postcolonial trauma—Japan as the x-factor in its paranoia-soaked horror—transforming it into one of the most haunting cinematic experiences, even if you are divorced from the cultural splash zone of its deep-seated dread and prejudice.
The setting of The Wailing, like any good horror film worth its salt, is a quiet, isolated countryside town where everyone knows everyone. Here, an inept and comfortably lazy cop, who even his colleagues groan about working with, named Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), suddenly becomes important at work when a mysterious plague haunts the sequestered South Korean village. All anyone knows is that whatever ailment’s been possessing people has caused them to go on a violent rampage, killing their loved ones and leaving them in a vegetative stupor. It’s a case Jong-goo is ill-equipped to solve but is forced to tap into the height of his deductive prowess—however accidental and hapless—to solve the strange occurrence in their village when it claims his daughter. And all signs point to the uncanny arrival of a Japanese foreigner, called “Japanese Man” (played by Jun Kunimura), in their village. But his presence, however sinister, is only the tip of the iceberg of suspects behind the quiet town’s occult conspiracy.
When all the horrors come rushing to Jong-goo’s doorstep, the mystique of The Wailing’s nesting dolls of mysteries braid together, making his paranoia seep from the screen and enter the viewer’s own consciousness. Along the way, The Wailing doesn’t lean on cheap jump scares to sell that sensorium of horror bubbling to the surface. Instead, it lingers. It hangs on shots. It lets dread bloom in the distance as something awful contorts just far enough away to spot you, then moseys toward you at its own pace. It is as fitting a metaphor as any for The Wailing‘s measured pace. It builds dread not through noise, but through presence. And it’s really good at it.
At the eye of the storm is Jong-goo—the bumbling policeman at the center of it all—who, alongside viewers, knows he’s on the right track, not handwaving the case as a string of strung-out drug users, but as something beyond a mountainous collection of empirical evidence. It doesn’t do him any favors that he’s going off a random nightmare of the Japanese man, making his man-who-cried-wolf case all the more perilous before you take into consideration his wanton prejudice against the stranger being bad for the believability of his over-the-top interrogations.
Layered into all this is a Shogun-like discord around language. Jong-goo repeatedly hurls slurs at the Japanese man, who he’s 99 percent sure is behind everything—a choice that’s entirely his, even as his fellow officers hesitate to follow his marching orders. All the while, a priest, clearly in over his head, serves as the translator between Joon-goo—who’s treating recurring nightmares as evidence—and the Japanese man, who’s visibly exhausted by having his admittedly cultish solitude disturbed. The language barrier becomes another source of paranoia, another veil between truth and assumption. The Wailing delights in playing themes and motifs.
The film owes its ominous atmosphere to the collective powers of its cast: Kunimura as the enigmatic outsider, Chun Woo-hee as the eerie “Mysterious Woman,” and Hwang Jung-min as the smarmy shaman whose rituals throw another wrench into the chaos. Their performances are a boon to the film’s winning, dizzying paranoia. Viewers are right there with Jong-goo, like Peter Parker in No Way Home, spider-sense going haywire in a revolving room full of people smiling to his face while, probably, wishing him ill. It’s the kind of paranoia-fueled horror where danger might be staring you dead in the face or helping you look for keys, even though they’re the ones who hid them.
It’s this friction between certainty and doubt, prejudice and paranoia, that makes The Wailing such an engrossing entry in the possession horror canon. It juggles so many spinning plates that don’t seem to fit together: part crime drama, part shamanistic fever dream. And yet, it does. Neatly and devastatingly.
Its cinematography is remarkable. Every frame emanates the air of leaving all of its eerie, beautiful, and unhinged imagery on screen. All in the effort of birthing a horror that wears an asymmetric face, slow-cooked in dread and juxtaposed against the oppressive quiet serenity of the countryside, where dangers could be lying in wait among the hills or inside the disheveled homes of people you once felt safe around.
The Wailing isn’t “elevated horror” or “cultural horror” in the way fans often label films that avoid jump scares or dabble in uncomfortable politics. It’s a mysterious third thing that’s become novel: genuineness. Hong-jin’s 2016 film unflinchingly explores how prejudice, ego, and social standing can cloud judgment—especially when someone’s expected to readily and repeatedly solve a mystery bigger than themselves. And somehow, despite Jong-goo being a scumbag, you empathize with him. Not for the racism, obviously, but he’s a hero in his daughter’s eyes. Not because he’s a good cop (he’s not), but because he’s her dad. Father is God in the eyes of a child. And the fear of failing her is so visceral, it permeates through the screen and soaks in the viewers’ bones—even when his daughter’s puppeteered silhouette stands in doorways like death itself.
By the time the film crescendos into its Orpheus-esque finale, many of its grotesque horrors have already sunk beneath the surface. What’s left is the undertow; a humongous wave threatens to pull viewers under with Jung-goo. And then, quietly, it leaves you with a feeling that echoes louder than any scream: Evil doesn’t have to be insidious. Sometimes it just lays out bait, not knowing what it’ll catch, reeling in whatever bites the line. Sussing out whether that evil is a perceived threat or a genuine one is where things get messy for Jong-goo, making The Wailing such a gem of a horror film.
I’m not haughty enough to claim I’ve fully unraveled The Wailing—or Exhuma, for that matter—and their shared excavation of postcolonial trauma between Japan and South Korea. But what lingers is unmistakable: a theme that functions like a one-way mirror—one that’s universal in its reflection, and personal in its sting. The Wailing picks at that scab, weaving apprehension and disorientation into something far more intimate. In all its chaos, it succeeded not just as horror but as a deeply affecting crime drama in disguise. It’s a film that haunts you long after the credits roll, not because it screams, but because it speaks plainly. And what it says is terrifying.
The Wailing is streaming on Hulu.
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