- Director
- Na Hong-jin
- Year
- 2016
- Country
- South Korea
- Runtime
- 156 min
Also released as
- Gok-seong
- Gokseong
- Goksung
- החלילן
- הקינה
- En presencia del diablo
- En Présence du Diable
- El lamento
- Kvílení
- Gok-sung
- 哭声/コクソン
- 哭声/コクソン:2016
- 哭声
- Goksung - La presenza del diavolo
Filed under
The Wailing
The Wailing is a 2016 South Korean psychological horror film directed by Na Hong-jin.
Two and a half hours, and it withholds whether the shaman is helping right until the end.
Sign in to track what you have survived.
Two and a half hours, and it withholds whether the shaman is helping right up until the end, and arguably past it.
A bumbling village policeman investigates a series of killings in which the perpetrators are found covered in boils and unresponsive. A Japanese stranger has moved into the woods. His daughter starts to change.
Na Hong-jin builds it as a comedy for the first forty minutes, with the policeman as a coward and a fool, and then removes the comedy without announcing it.
The extended ritual sequence, cut between a shamanic exorcism and something happening elsewhere, is a bravura twenty minutes.
The film is about the cost of doubt, and it is constructed so that the protagonist's every choice is defensible and every one is wrong.
Nobody agrees on what happens. That is the design and the film gives you enough to argue either way.
Rate this film
No ratings yet. Score it on the five axes and yours will be the first.
Sign in to rate this and add it to your shelf.
Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
Canada
Germany
UK
USA
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
Discuss with AI
Open a chatbot with a question about this already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, a plot detail, or working out which cut you are holding.
Adjacent
Thelma
A Norwegian student with a repressive religious upbringing discovers her desire has physical consequences.
The Blackcoat's Daughter
Oz Perkins' debut. Glacial, wintry, and the timeline is doing something you will only spot late.
Hereditary
A film about grief that turns out to be a film about a cult. Toni Collette should have won everything.
A Field in England
Deserters in the English Civil War eat mushrooms and dig for treasure while reality dissolves. Shot in black and white in twelve days.
Oldboy
A man is imprisoned in a room for fifteen years with no explanation, released, and given five days to find out why.
Get Out
Won the screenplay Oscar, which horror never does. The sunken place is the best new image in the genre this century.
- Next in Folk Horror: Thelma (2017) →
- Next in Possession / Demonic: Verónica (2017) →
- Next in Psychological: Thelma (2017) →