In its first scenes, this Korean occult-horror film sets up a familiar situation. Sergeant Jong-goo (Do Won Kwak), a cop in the village, is called in to investigate a murder. He is a devoted family man, married, with a young daughter, Hyo-jin (Kim Hwan-hee), he is devoted to. Jong-goo’s mother, watchful and protective, also lives with them. But the tone of charming, relaxed domesticity is gradually darkened as the details of the crime predominate: a resident of the town has murdered a shopkeeper at his workplace, transported the body to the man’s home, then murdered the shopkeeper’s wife. The killings are bloody and brutal. The police find the murderer on the scene, covered in ugly sores, babbling and incoherent. No motive is known. But there are rumors that a stranger who has come to stay in the village, a Japanese man, is somehow responsible. Other, unexplained murders occur, and now it is beyond doubt: the “Jap” has brought evil with him.

The darkening tone is not necessarily a problem. Popular classics like Poltergeist and The Exorcist, as well as recent winners like The Babadook, pull the audience into the darkness, willingly, when the story follows a clean line to some explanation that, even if supernatural, can be understood as the battle between good and evil. The good is the warm, nurturing family; the evil is…whatever. A ghost, the devil or some lesser demon. But The Wailing, at over two and a half hours, tries to do too much. While its theological and ethnological themes are interesting, they only muddle the conflict, which should remain clear throughout. This reduces the horror, no matter how skillfully staged.

Korean writer-director Hong-jin Na shows real skill, especially in setting up the situation. The village is small, rural, with a primitive but serviceable infrastructure. The cars and fashion look contemporary, but the tiny, crude homes are hardly more than shacks. The best element of the film is the scenic design, which does much to place the story in a real-world setting. It helps to establish a mood of growing, creeping dread, which the villagers seem to have accustomed themselves to. Ugly, but effective.

Na also casts and directs his actors well. As the sergeant, Do Won Kwak is warm and devoted to his adorable daughter. A good cop, he’s just not as sharp as the knives used in the murders. Na’s wittiest touch is the unconcealed cowardice Jong-goo shows in the face of danger, at least until pushed into an enraged violence when his daughter is threatened by a demon. But the film’s triumph is Kim Hwan-hee as Hyo-jin. A fresh, totally unaffected child actress, she credibly transforms from an angelic pre-teen to a frightening instrument of evil.

But, as with his meandering story, Na stages the action scenes with less than a sure hand. The first exorcism starts memorably, with Hwang Jung-min, a handsome actor cast against type as the shaman, doing some weird “Twyla Tharp” moves that evoke chills. But Na laboriously intercuts this with the stranger grimly performing his own protective rituals, repetitively, so that the climax has reduced impact. Later, once Jong-goo and the other villagers attack the stranger, the gory battles are also overdone, and needlessly repeated. The neat touches – like the stranger taking a snapshot at the film’s climax – are overwhelmed by the excess.

In short, Na mishandles some promising material. But I’ll let you decide. If you’re looking for occult mystery, a sustained mood of terror and sympathetic characters in peril, there’s some reward here. Still, I kept thinking about how Don Siegel or, better, Robert Wise would have handled this script. Siegel, of course, would take on anything you threw at him. He’d make it swifter and scarier, but the story would stay a mess. He’d never demand a rewrite: “why would they listen to me?” But Wise, who had real power in the industry, would demand, and get, a major revision. His film would have fewer money shots, but each one would be a shrieker. And it would run less than two hours, too.

 

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