I’ll get the easy part out of the way. The Wailing is a supernatural mystery in which a lot of people in a small town are killing each other in zombiepocalypse-adjacent ways, but with no transmission of disease. Is the problem drugs? Mushrooms? Demons? Ghosts? Evil spirits? (Do Koreans distinguish between the latter three possibilities?) But then it turns personal when a local cop’s daughter is possessed by the same force. On the one hand, we never see the incubation period of the drugs-or-mushrooms-or-demons in any of the other murderous victims, so her slow deterioration might still be perfectly reasonable under any of those explanations, but on the other hand, she’s a little too young to have gotten mixed up in drugs or random forest mushrooms, probably.

The meat of the movie, though, is what I want to talk about, except it’s entirely spoilers, more than the arguably too many I’ve already provided, so I’ll go to a cut.

Everything from here is spoilers for most of the movie, and eventually probably all of it, though I haven’t decided yet. Last chance to turn back!

So the deal is, there’s this old Japanese guy out in the woods, and… look, I know I have only the barest inkling of the ways in which the Japanese occupation of Korea[1] affected those and the next several generations. But I knew enough to know that when said old man comes under suspicion by our main cop character and he quickly goes way past the line [that we pretend exists between police and policed, despite all evidence to the contrary], when those things happened, I knew that I was either watching a morality play about the fear of the other, or I was watching something that I was going to feel uncomfortable about for a while, and not in the good actually scary or disturbing horror movie way I generally seek out.

Except, okay, after a while it turns back into a mystery, like, is it really him causing it, or is it someone else? So, yay, morality play after all!

I now realize the decision about whether to spoil through the end of the movie was always made for me from the moment I started talking about this at all, because it’s not like I can say “oops, here’s where the rest of the spoilers are, don’t read further again” without it being really obvious what happens, and I couldn’t have stopped at the “check out this uncomfortable dichotomy” either, because who is not going to want to know that resolution before deciding to watch? Practically nobody, that’s who!

Anyway… a) the ending is convoluted as all get out, and I don’t really understand enough about what was going on regardless of who the bad guys turned out to be. There were strong Christianity vibes, but they did not work out in such a way as to tell me who committed what sins when that would explain why evil fell upon the town, even though they acted like those answers were being provided. And I have no idea, none, zero, what was going on with the shaman who was hired in act two to cleanse the daughter of her possession. Different scenes were in direct contradiction with each other, although here I should admit I watched this while working and since it was a movie with subtitles, it’s not impossible that I missed a key line of dialogue somewhere? But I don’t think so.

But b) what I did understand was that they went from a mystery that appeared to be a morality play about not fearing the other just because he’s other, maybe taking that play a step further to: not fearing the other even though a century ago the other had your nation under its imperial boots, they went from that position at the midpoint of the movie and landed on, haha, no, old Japanese men who move into our Korean towns are literally the Devil. Which… like I implied a while ago, it’s not my place to judge a dark and bleak history that I know little of, was not present for, and definitely was not told stories about from people who lived through it, some of whom are still alive today.

But as a moderately socially aware person, it was hard to watch a movie whose core message was, yes, fear the other, nothing has changed.

All of that said: as a supernatural horror movie, it was actually quite good. But there’s no escaping that the core was, for me, rotten.

[1] 1910-1945, so it was a minute ago, and at this point should be fading from living memory