The Wailing (The Stranger) — Shamanism, Demon Plague, and the Existential Collapse of Rural Faith

The Wailing (The Stranger) isn’t a horror movie. It’s an exorcism in its own right—a three-hour ritual Na Hong-jin performs with the precision of a modern-day shaman and the cruelty of an executioner. While Hollywood keeps regurgitating possessions starring teens screaming "Vade retro!" in Google Translate Latin, the South Korean filmmaker drags us into a rural swamp of paranoia where faith rots, reason crumbles, and the devil doesn’t need special effects to scare the hell out of you. Here, the real monster isn’t the glacial-eyed Japanese elder—it’s doubt: that crack in the mind Hong-jin exploits with cinematic sadism until it becomes an endless abyss.

finalExplicado_en: "In the climax, the shaman's ritual to expel the demon from the possessed girl collapses into chaos as the stranger—revealed as a demonic entity—unleashes hell on the village. The policeman's desperate attempt to save his daughter ends in her monstrous transformation and his own death, while the Christian pastor's faith fails against the overwhelming evil. The stranger walks away unscathed as the village is consumed by plague and madness. The ending symbolizes the total existential collapse of rural Korean faith: neither shamanism, Christianity, nor rational law can withstand primordial demonic forces. Humanity's spiritual systems are revealed as fragile illusions, leaving only cosmic indifference and the triumph of ancient evil."

Gokseong: A Town Cursed by Design

The setting isn’t accidental. Gokseong, that mountain village perpetually shrouded in fog, is a character in its own right—a living entity that breathes dampness and distrust. Hong-jin and his cinematographer, Hong Kyung-pyo (the same visual sorcerer behind Parasite), turn the landscape into a claustrophobic limbo where every tree seems to whisper secrets and every house hides a corpse or a hallucination. The fog isn’t a cheap aesthetic trick; it’s a physical metaphor for the moral blindness afflicting the characters. In The Wailing, you don’t see the horror coming because the horror is already inside you, festering like the pustules covering the possessed.

The color palette is a nightmare of earthy tones and rotten greens, as if Technicolor itself had caught the same disease plaguing the town. The lighting, always dim and naturalistic, avoids the gothic chiaroscuro of Western horror to embrace a documentary-like rawness. When the camera enters the Japanese elder’s cabin (Jun Kunimura), it does so with the morbid curiosity of an anthropologist studying a cannibal tribe. There are no jump scares here—just unbearable tension that builds like sweat on Jong-goo’s forehead, the cop protagonist played by Kwak Do-won with a perfect mix of cowardice and paternal desperation.

Jong-goo: The Antihero We Deserve (and the One We Deserve)

Kwak Do-won doesn’t play a hero, not even an antihero. Jong-goo is an everyman elevated to the status of an unwilling martyr—a family man who goes from laughing at rumors about the Japanese outsider to being dragged into a hell with no escape. His arc is that of a man who discovers, too late, that faith isn’t a shield but a trap. In a key scene, Jong-goo, drunk and desperate, prays before a makeshift altar while his daughter Hyo-jin (Kim Hwan-hee, chilling in her corrupted innocence) writhes on the floor as if her body were a sack of snakes. The camera, in a seemingly endless long take, captures the moment hope turns into hysteria. There’s no redemption here—just the certainty that, no matter what you do, the devil has already won.

Hong-jin mocks the classic police thriller structure. The first half of the film plays like a rural drama with dark comedy undertones: Jong-goo and his fellow cops are incompetent clowns, more concerned with lunch than solving crimes. But when the plot veers into the supernatural, the tone grows increasingly oppressive, as if the film itself were contracting the disease ravaging Gokseong. The labyrinthine, deliberately ambiguous script toys with the audience like a cat with a dying mouse. Every clue is a lie, every revelation a new layer of confusion. By the time you reach the climax, you no longer know if the Japanese elder is a demon, a scapegoat, or just a poor devil (pun intended) trapped in someone else’s nightmare.

The Dual Exorcism: When Cinema Becomes a Trance

The central sequence of The Wailing is one of those rare moments when cinema transcends its own nature to become something akin to a ritual. The dual exorcism—the showdown between the shaman Il-gwang (Hwang Jung-min, oscillating between charisma and grotesquerie) and the Japanese elder—is a tour de force of editing, sound, and performance that leaves the viewer exhausted. Hong-jin cuts between the frenzy of the shamanic ritual (with its drums, chants, and animal sacrifices) and the almost Zen stillness of the foreigner’s cabin, where Jun Kunimura watches it all with a smile carved from ice.

Sound is key here. The score, composed by Dalpalan, abandons any pretense of melody to plunge into a rhythmic chaos of tribal percussion, bloodcurdling screams, and whistles straight from the underworld. The editing, by Kim Sun-min, is a choreography of images that sear into your retina: the black rooster’s throat being slit, blood splattering the girl’s face, fire consuming everything in its path. This isn’t a horror scene—it’s a physical experience, like having your fingernails pulled out one by one.

And then there’s Chun Woo-hee as the mysterious woman in white, a specter who appears and vanishes like a death omen. Her presence is so unsettling that, at one point, Jong-goo accuses her of being a gumiho (a nine-tailed fox from Korean folklore). But, like everything in The Wailing, her true role is an enigma. Is she an ally? A victim? Or just another piece in the sadistic game fate (or the devil) has set for Jong-goo?

The Ending: Doubt as Eternal Damnation

The Wailing’s finale is a slap in the face to anyone expecting a clean resolution, a rational explanation, or—God forbid—a happy ending. Hong-jin shows no mercy. The film ends as it began: in the fog, with doubt gnawing at every fiber of your being. Was the Japanese elder the source of the curse? Or was it all a collective hallucination, a psychotic outbreak fueled by fear and superstition? The answer, as in real life, is that there is no answer. The devil doesn’t need explanations; he just needs you to doubt enough to leave the door ajar.

This is The Wailing’s true horror: not the murders, not the demons, not the possessions, but the idea that in a world where faith and reason are equally useless, the only way out is madness. The Book of Job said suffering is a divine test, but Hong-jin goes one step further: What if suffering is simply man’s natural state? What if God (or the gods, or the devil) is nothing more than an indifferent spectator of our pain?

Cinephile Comparisons: When Horror Becomes Art

The Wailing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its DNA can be traced to masterpieces of psychological and folk horror, but it surpasses them all in ambition and execution.

• Folk Horror: It shares The Witch (2015)’s obsession with folklore as a source of terror, but while Eggers stays on the surface, Hong-jin dives into the metaphysical. Where The Witch is a history lesson, The Wailing is a mystical experience.
• Psychological Horror: It recalls Rosemary’s Baby (1968) in its exploration of paranoia and betrayed faith, but Polanski was a kid playing with matches compared to Hong-jin’s wildfire.
• Supernatural Thriller: It echoes The Thing (1982) in its atmosphere of absolute distrust, but Carpenter never dared to push ambiguity to Hong-jin’s extremes.
• Korean Cinema: It’s the spiritual sibling of Memories of Murder (2003), also by Bong Joon-ho, in its portrayal of a rural community ravaged by violence. But where Bong focuses on social critique, Hong-jin aims straight for the soul.

The Best

• Gokseong’s atmosphere: A town so damp and oppressive you’ll need a shower (and an exorcist) after watching the film.
• The dual exorcism: A sequence that’ll leave your knuckles white and your jaw unhinged, as if you’d survived a voodoo ritual.
• Jun Kunimura: His performance is so unsettling you’ll side-eye every Asian elder in the woods (and rightfully so).

The Worst

• The comedic start: The first 30 minutes of bumbling cops clash so hard with the later tone they feel like they’re from another movie (and not a good one).

The Verdict of Claqueta Ácida (9.6/10)

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