The Wailing

    The Wailing
    2016

    Synopsis

    A stranger arrives in a little village and soon after a mysterious sickness starts spreading. A policeman is drawn into the incident and is forced to solve the mystery in order to save his daughter.

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    Cast

    • Kwak Do-wonJong-goo
    • Hwang Jung-minIl-gwang
    • Chun Woo-heeMoo-myeong
    • Jun KunimuraThe Stranger
    • Kim Hwan-heeHyo-jin
    • Heo JinMother-in-Law
    • Jang So-yeonJong-goo's Wife
    • Kim Do-yoonYang Yi-sam
    • Jo Han-chulDetective
    • Son Kang-gookOh Sung-bok

    Recommendations

    • 100

      Salon

      Forget the inflated Trumpian moral dilemmas of "Superman" and "Captain America." The summer’s most powerful and most disturbing thriller has arrived, in the form of an intensely atmospheric Korean movie called The Wailing.
    • 90

      Screen Daily

      Na’s screenplay takes viewers to the root of evil in a manner that subverts expectations and cleverly manipulates cause and effect at almost every turn.
    • 88

      Slant Magazine

      Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less.
    • 83

      The Playlist

      The film is a bullet train of laughs, gore, frights and folklore, making the two-and-a-half hour runtime feel like a couple of minutes. Blink and you might miss the whole thing.
    • 83

      The Film Stage

      Designed and choreographed with stupendous pizzazz, it’s an explosion of colors, noises, and murderous zest that floods the senses, reminding you in a (skipped) heartbeat how frightfully entertaining these supposedly artless horror flicks can be.
    • 83

      The A.V. Club

      The Wailing might be a somewhat meandering and nonsensical genre recombination, but that spell never breaks over its lengthy running time.
    • 70

      The Hollywood Reporter

      As dark and pessimistic as the rest of South Korean thrill-master Na Hong Jin’s work, The Wailing (Goksung, a.k.a. The Strangers in France) is long and involving, permeated by a tense, sickening sense of foreboding, yet finally registers on a slightly lower key than the director’s acclaimed genre films The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010).
    • 70

      Variety

      On the one hand, the film is a gripping whodunnit, exemplified by a scene of classic Hitchcockian suspense, when Jong-gu makes a frightening discovery while snooping around the Japanese man. At the same time it treads into supernatural territory through nightmarish dream sequences that feel unnervingly real.

    Liked by

    • Antihero