One of the perennial linchpins of horror is belief. Things happen in horror movies that aren’t supposed to happen in the real world, and so it’s not unusual for horror movies to employ a narrative device where the protagonists try to convince someone that a threat is real, only to be dismissed for lack of evidence or because what they’re saying is preposterous. It adds tension, sometimes more subtly, more often less so. But either way, what it does is disrupt belief. The world does not contain monsters, the doubters (most often adults or authority figures) say, and then the monster says otherwise, usually in violence. Faith is important, and those who suffer crises of faith, at least in horror films, are generally not long for this world. Sometimes you have to discard reason and evidence and just trust what someone is saying. You have to take a leap of faith.
Gok-seong (The Wailing) does a lot of things right - maybe not everything, but a lot of things - and one of the things it does right is interrogate faith. What do you believe, and why? Do you believe your own eyes? What others tell you? What you are taught? What are the consequences of faith?
Jong-goo is a policeman in the sleepy little South Korean village of Gok-seong, and as the film opens, you kind of feel sorry for him. Pudgy, hangdog Jong-goo, living in a small house with his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law, reduced to assignations with his wife in the back seat of their car, and a career on the force that is probably best described as “bumbling.” As the film opens, he’s late to yet another crime scene. And it’s an unusually bad one for Gok-seong, the brutal double murder of a married couple. A total stranger just walked into their house and stabbed them to death, and then waited outside in a daze. The senselessness and violence are bad enough, but Jong-goo immediately notices some odd things about the scene. Why is the killer just waiting there? What’s that weird rash he’s got? Why are there stalks of withered flowers tied above the doorway? Nobody listens to him, of course. Why pay attention to Jong-goo?
Meanwhile, old men are spotted in the woods feasting on the carcasses of wildlife. Nobody believes the person who saw that either - he was drunk and had fallen down a steep hill. And then another mysterious death - a woman attempts to murder her husband and burns their house down. She’s got a strange rash, as well. People start to talk - it must be that old Japanese man who just moved to town. Lives deep in the valley outside the village, keeps to himself.
Who else could it be?
The first fourth or so of the film plays out almost like a semi-comic police procedural. Jong-goo and his partner aren’t especially diligent cops, and they spook easily. They’re as likely to swallow whole whatever weird speculation or knee-jerk superstitions their buddies offer up as they are to go out and actually investigate stuff, and all the while the bodies keep coming, each case as inexplicable as the one before. And then things take a turn as the mysterious malady strikes a little too close to home, and although it puts a fire under Jong-goo to find out exactly what’s going on, there’s also something a little unsettling about how quickly and casually he abandons proper police procedure (not to mention civil liberties) to find out exactly what’s going on, and it starts to become very clear that he’s messing with things way, WAY above his spiritual pay grade. It’s an odd tonal shift - not quite jarring, but as it moves from the first to second act, there’s a definite shedding of the slacker of the film’s beginning in favor of someone more driven, if not any better at his job. The comedy falls away, like the moment where you realize someone’s gone from kidding to deadly serious.
And it’s here, once shit gets real, that the film becomes really occupied with ideas of faith. Jong-goo consults Catholic priests and shamen alike to figure out what’s going on, and everyone’s got a different explanation, but the ones that keep rising to the fore converge on that mysterious old Japanese man who lives out in the middle of nowhere. Likewise, as viewers we’re encourage to develop our own ideas about what’s going on as well, Belief is as much a part of watching films as it is being a character in one. We know what we see on the screen, we’ve heard the testimony from the people Jong-goo interviews, and we’re savvy moviegoers, so we know when we’re being manipulated. We can spot little details, bring up narrative conventions we’ve seen in the past, stay one step ahead of the story. And it’s really tempting to do that with this film, as it unfolds over a spacious (maybe a little too spacious) two and a half hours. If it shifts into gear about 45 minutes in, it really revs up at about the halfway point, with an intense, kinetic sequence involving rituals intended to banish spirits, and here’s where we really sort of start to see what’s going on - there are multiple faiths here, multiple perspectives, multiple possibilities, and seeing them all intersect suggests that maybe we shouldn’t be so smug in our predictions. Nothing is ever as simple and cut-and-dried as it looks, and the whole truth is rarely apparent until it’s all too late.
It’s a really striking film - gorgeously shot and lit, alternating between breathtaking mountain and forest vistas and gray, rain-soaked rural squalor. It draws from police procedurals, ghost stories, zombie films, and films about demonic possession while maintaining a consistent internal logic, pulling Jong-goo further and further away from rational explanation and maybe leaving him a little adrift at the same time. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, he’s way out of his depth, but he doesn’t have much of a choice. Even a late-film sequence where he puts an ad-hoc posse together resurrects a little of the comic vibe of the beginning (which is a little off-putting at first, because this film works much better when it doesn’t feel like an episode of Scooby-Doo), only to abandon it as things go terribly, terribly off the rails.
Nobody really knows what’s going on, and they’re grasping for any explanation. Once they’ve found one that fits the facts they have, they act. Likewise, as the audience, versed as we are in the conventions of certain types of film, we observe different perspectives and draw our conclusions. But it’s not what we think, and this is embodied neatly by a climactic confrontation with the evil at the heart of the village’s misery. It talks of doubt, and the certainty of faith, and how that faith can blind us. It’s not just talking to the character, it’s talking to us as well. Because most people will be pretty certain they know what’s going on by the time the film gets to that point. But Jong-goo thought he knew what was going on as well, his colleagues thought they knew what was going on. Everyone, including us, thought we knew what was going on. But none of us did. It’s a somewhat uneven ride getting there, but it lands solidly in the horror of discovery and makes us work for it on the way there.
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