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Director
Na Hong-jin
Year
2016
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

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.

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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.

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Trailer

The sleeves

The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.

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