The Wailing (2016) opens in a village where people are killing their families. The police don't know why. The villagers don't know why. And Na Hong-jin, who wrote and directed this 156-minute Korean horror film, spends every one of those minutes making sure the audience doesn't know why either. That sustained, deliberate refusal to resolve is not a flaw. It's the engine. This review of The Wailing argues that the film is one of the most ferociously ambitious horror movies of the 21st century, a work that earns its length, its strangeness, and its final gut-punch through sheer commitment.
What the film is actually about
Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won) is a bumbling, cowardly police officer in the mountain village of Goksung. When a series of gruesome murders breaks out, suspicion falls on a Japanese stranger (Jun Kunimura) who has recently moved into a remote cabin in the hills. Jong-goo investigates, reluctantly, while people around him transform: the infected grow boils, behave with animal savagery, and then kill. When Jong-goo's young daughter Hyo-jin (Kim Hwan-hee) begins showing the same symptoms, the investigation becomes something far more desperate.
Na layers three competing explanations across the film. The Japanese stranger may be a demon. A mysterious woman in white (Chun Woo-hee) may be a ghost or a shaman protecting the village. A local shaman, Il-gwang (Hwang Jung-min), performs a harrowing exorcism ritual that runs nearly 20 minutes of screen time. Each of these figures carries their own internal logic. None of them can be fully trusted. That's the point.
Na Hong-jin's control of tone
What makes The Wailing so distinctively difficult to shake is how Na moves between registers without losing his grip on the film's emotional core. Jong-goo is played as near-comedy in the opening act: he's slow, easily spooked, and regularly embarrassed by his female colleagues. Na uses this softness deliberately. By the time the film requires Kwak Do-won to carry scenes of raw paternal anguish, the contrast is shocking. You've watched a buffoon become a father watching his daughter die. The shift costs the audience something.
The film's mid-section contains the exorcism sequence, which rivals anything in The Exorcist (1973) for sheer sustained intensity. Hwang Jung-min's shaman performance is physically extraordinary: frantic, rhythmic, genuinely alarming. Na cuts between this ritual and a parallel ceremony conducted by the Japanese stranger, and the editing creates a question about causality that the film never answers. Is the exorcism helping or hurting? Is the stranger causing the girl's suffering or reacting to it?
Horror rarely asks questions that hard and leaves them that clean.
The film's debt to Korean folklore
The Wailing draws on Korean shamanist tradition (the mudang, or shaman, is a real cultural figure), Japanese folklore's conception of the hungry ghost, and Christian imagery. Jong-goo's final encounter with a figure claiming to be a victim involves explicit references to the New Testament story of doubting Thomas. Na uses these sources not to explain the horror but to multiply it. Each tradition offers a framework that almost fits, then doesn't quite.
This approach puts The Wailing in the company of films like Midsommar (2019), which uses Scandinavian folk ritual to similar effect: the more specific and authentic the cultural detail, the more disorienting the horror becomes. Familiarity, the films suggest, is no protection. Religious systems you don't fully understand are at least as frightening as monsters.
Kim Hwan-hee's performance
The film's most devastating element is Kim Hwan-hee as Hyo-jin. She was 11 years old during production. Na asks her to play demonic possession as full-body rage directed at her father, and she delivers something genuinely difficult to watch. The scene in which she screams accusations at Jong-goo while he tries to maintain that she's his daughter is the film's emotional center. It works because Kim plays it not as supernatural but as wounded. Whatever is happening to Hyo-jin, the anger feels real.
That ambiguity is everything. The Wailing refuses to confirm whether possession, illness, or something else is at work. Jong-goo's failure to protect his daughter is both a horror cliché and a human catastrophe, and Na keeps both registers alive simultaneously.
What doesn't quite work
At 156 minutes, The Wailing does test patience in its second act. The village investigation sequences repeat certain beats, and some of the supporting characters function purely as plot mechanics without the texture Na gives his three central figures. The film's ambiguity, which is largely a strength, can occasionally read as narrative avoidance rather than design. A viewer who needs even one clean answer will leave frustrated.
These are real costs. But they're costs the film is willing to pay, and Na earns enough trust that most viewers will follow him through the rougher passages.
Why it belongs in the canon
The Wailing arrived in the same year as Train to Busan (2016), which confirmed that South Korean genre cinema had hit a peak of international ambition and craft. Where Train to Busan uses horror to deliver emotional clarity, The Wailing uses it to produce the opposite: a film that ends and keeps moving inside you precisely because it won't stop asking what you believe.
The final 20 minutes are as well-constructed as anything in horror cinema. Na stages a sequence in which Jong-goo makes a choice based on who he trusts, and the film makes clear the choice is wrong, though it won't tell you what the right choice was. The closing image is one of genuine grief, stripped of context, and it lands hard.
The Wailing is not comfortable viewing. It's long, strange, exhausting in the best sense, and it treats its audience as capable of sustaining uncertainty. Na Hong-jin made a film that doesn't want to be decoded. It wants to be felt. That's rare. It's worth the 156 minutes.
Verdict
Rating: 9/10. Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a horror film of uncommon scale and nerve. Devastating, unresolved, and unlike anything else in the genre.