While horror features will crowd multiplexes throughout the summer, we can bet there won’t be a freakier, better-directed genre offering than The Wailing. During much of Na Hong-jin‘s horror-thriller — which details a mysterious evil force invading a small village — I kept wondering, “why can’t most mid-budget Hollywood tentpoles execute their story with this level of visual clarity and slickness?” Thankfully, Well Go USA are releasing it quite soon after its Cannes premiere — tomorrow, in fact — and they’ve delivered a new trailer and poster.
We said in our review, “This technical finesse combined with an utter fearlessness to go extreme — which has consistently helped propel Korean genre films to dizzying heights — culminated in a prolonged later scene of dueling cultish rituals that’s mad in all the right ways. Designed and choreographed with stupendous pizzazz, it’s an explosion of colors, noises, and murderous zest that floods the senses, reminding you in a (skipped) heartbeat how frightfully entertaining these supposedly artless horror flicks can be.”
Check out the trailer below for the film (which we named one of the must-sees of June) starring Hwang Jung-Min, Chun Woo-Hee, Kwak Do-Woni, and Jun Kunimura.
In this unbelievably tense supernatural thriller, a foreigner’s mysterious appearance in a quiet, rural village causes suspicion among the locals—suspicion which quickly turns to hysteria as the townspeople begin killing each other in brutal outbursts for seemingly no reason. As the investigating officer watches his daughter fall under the same savage spell, he agrees to consult a shaman for answers—unknowingly escalating the situation into something far more dangerous. Over six years in the making, director Na Hong-jin’s meticulously crafted follow-up to the globally acclaimed The Yellow Sea and The Chaser (his third to premiere at the Festival de Cannes) smashed box office records upon its debut in South Korea, where fans are already making return viewings to catch new clues and debate what’s sure to be the most talked-about ending of 2016.
The Wailing opens in limited release on June 3 and expands this month.