The Wailing

Today's horror film takes us to South Korea for The Wailing. An enormous film clocking in at two and a half hours, The Wailing finds a small mountain village besieged by a string of horrific murders and strange happenings. The events are blamed upon a great evil, with the focus of that blame being placed on a newcomer to town: the mysterious and unnamed Japanese man. After a bumbling police officer's (and I mean BUMBLING, bro couldn't find his butt with both hands) daughter becomes inflicted with a strange possession rash (apparently that's a thing), a shaman is called in to exorcise the town. Or is he? Hmmmm.... 

And that's just the first hour and a half, you guys. 

So there I was, watching the movie, when I had to pee. As one does. The huge shamanic ceremony to exorcise the demons was happening and I figured, this has gotta be the climax, right? I can make it another 10 minutes before getting up to go to the bathroom. Yeah, nope. I check the runtime... 58 minutes remaining. This movie is long you guys, like we're talking Lord of the Rings epic-type movie length long. Now, I'm not one to usually complain about movie length, but I have to side with this Alfred Hitchock quote on this one: "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." Amen, you rotund silhouetted Brit. Amen. 

It's unfortunate that the length of The Wailing has to be such a topic of my conversation around it because really, length aside, it's a pretty damn fine film with layers and questions and a pretty solid horror kitchen sink. The movie looks deeply at themes of good and evil from a myriad of perspectives: Eastern faiths, Western Christian faith, shamanic ritual, and more. Between the shaman, the Japanese man, and the lady in white, with this poor village led by Bumbly Cop McGee over here (SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS. MOST BUMBLING COP EVER), there's a deep fight between different faiths and cultures. That manifests as a damn cool mashup of different perspectives on what possession is and what the very nature of evil, and good for that matter, is.

The movie can be occasionally a bit too kitchen-sinky, but it's all part of The Wailing's... charm, I guess. We'll go with that. It's at times a possession film, at times a murder mystery, and for one scene, a zombie film, all while being about a more grand battle between the forces of light and darkness. It leaves you with far more questions than answers, and while at first I felt alienated by that, the more I think that ambiguity is part of what makes the film work (especially in light of watching an extended ending that was cut that gave everything away). 

This is a pretty solid horror film, but the biggest thing keeping it from true greatness is that epic runtime. Unfortunately, The Wailing never seems to fully earn the epic nature it's obviously striving for. It leaves you feeling like some trimming of the fat would have helped the movie reach classic status, but as it stands it's a bloated but intriguing horror film that looks at deep themes of what good and evil actually are. 

8/10