Earlier this year I celebrated Bong Joon-ho and his movie Parasite's sweeping of the Oscars by watching a ton of Korean movies. South Korea's movies are not easy watches. Those dramas make them out to be very unhappy people. Even the movies that start out light and funny turn into miserable exercises in tragedy and social disintegration. They're all great movies, even this. But they're heavy, upsetting things that make you feel worse.
The Wailing probably should not have hit me as hard as it did. I have seen plenty of grim Korean movies. For this series I saw Pulse and a Lars von Trier movie, neither are exactly big happy fun times for the whole family. I was fine after both of those. I could not really say why The Wailing in particular left so beaten and defeated. It isn't that much worse than say Burning or Mother, it is actually lighter than Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. But this one hurt. It really did.
The opening of The Wailing seems inspired by Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, a 2003 murder mystery drama that ends very poorly for everybody involved. Both are about a small Korean town beset by horrible murders which the local police force is completely unable to handle. Our lead is Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), a chubby and incompetent police sergeant who is the wrong man for the job. He's a failure, but a lovable one. He has a young daughter Hyo-Jin (Kim Hwan-hee), who is possibly more mature than her father.
Imagine Paul Blart trying to solve supernatural killings. Yet the movie plays the horror and drama entirely straight. That's the real genius of Korean movies, they are not afraid to be silly and funny even if their ultimate aim is bitter tragedy. If anything, the comedy disarms you further and lets the ending hit you even harder. If anybody does not deserve what is coming to him, it's Jong-goo. He's scaredy-cat who screams helplessly at anything spooky.
Even the horror elements in The Wailing alternate between straight fear and horror comedy. There's a lot of comic yelping from the entire cast. Even as late as two hours in when Jong-goo and his friends are fighting a zombie, it's like Shaun of the Dead slapstick. The monster has a rake stuck in his head and everybody is slipping on their ass. There's a point where they keep screaming for so long I just started laughing uncontrollably.
The Wailing has a complicated and confusing plot. Normally this would be a detriment, but it fits with who our protagonist is. Jong-goo has no idea what is going on in his village and neither do you. There's a sullen elderly Japanese man (Jun Kunimura) who might be causing the outbreak of unexplainable murders. Or maybe it is a mysterious woman in white (Chun Woo-hee). Jong-goo hires a shaman, Il-gwang (Hwang Jung-min) to try to exorcise the demons. But Il-gwang only makes things more difficult because his story keeps changing.
By the end, Jong-goo has no idea what do to. He's trapped between bad advice and unrelenting horror at all sides. All the dude wanted to do was read manhwa comics and sloppily bang his girlfriend. Instead his life is an incomprehensible nightmare.
Maybe that's why The Wailing hurts so bad. Jong-goo has no tragic flaw other than being a silly fatass. Still, such horrible things happen to him. It is clearly unfair. Evil wins again, just like it does in the real world every fucking time. You try your best and the only help you have comes from useless people with their own agendas. Decades pass and evil only gets stronger and its crimes are forgiven due to the sheer enormity of its next cycle of violence and lies. Competent or incompetent, hard-working or lazy, knowledgeable or ignorantly, you're still as hopelessly lost before the sheer enormity of hate and injustice on this Earth. Screaming is about all Jong-goo can do.
Wailing into the oblivion is about all anybody can do either in times like these
Next Time: I didn't need The Wailing right now. .That wasn't fun. I want to have fun tomorrow. Let's do The Final Destination (2009).
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