Review of The Wailing (2016) by Davey K — 08 Feb 2018

If you've got two and a half hours to kill, and you don't feel like watching Lord of the Rings again, might I recommend Twentieth Century Fox's version of shamanism and possession that is sure to make all the evil mouths in you howl. THE WAILING has achieved something no other film in my adult life has ever done, it has seared an image so powerful into my brain that it sunk below my subconscious mind and crouched there as it waits for me to dream again.

When an evil spirit possesses several members of a South Korean village including the daughter of a bumbling policeman her family calls upon a shaman to rid their house of the ghost. Beside the gruesome aftermath of the possessions, which eventually leaves the possessed covered in boils, rashes, their spines cracking through their bellies all while being remotely controlled to kill their families by the spirit like a hell bent Darth Vader, there's no greater purpose to this exercise than for the spirit to watch-similar to the way the audience watches-the horror unfold.

The most troubling parts of this movie lie in the film's interstices. It's the relationship that grows like a spire between the audience and the evil spirit who both gain something by watching, and at some point or another horror fans are bound to ask themselves-and it's a damn good question-why do we watch.

It's the humorous wide space between a trigger happy militarized American police and a totally unarmed Korean police who, when confronted with carcass eating demons, have nothing but their walkie-talkies and chubby legs to defend themselves. It's the almost nonexistent differences between the ritual magic of a devil and a shaman. It's the way the camera slithers through a crime scene never allowing the eye to focus on the gore. It's the field opening up between vision and imagination, the way a hunched figure is infinitely more terrifying when seen out of the corner of an eye, the mystery frozen in a shrouded peripheral. This could be one reason why we watch. We want to see what the monster looks like on screen, we want to see it because we don't want to imagine it. We don't want to have to imagine it.