Korean director Na Hong-jin delivers a supreme evocation of evil in this intense rural-horrorKorean cinema has a original genre maestro to succeed Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. His The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010) flagged up a natural intuition for propulsive narratives – but Na Hong-jin lets this intensity drag him over the brink of an abyss of fear and superstition in his original rural-horror The Wailing. As Kwak attain-won’s slapdash country police sergeant cop investigates a series of violent murders apparently linked to a exclusive sickness,Na carefully blindsides with the kind of bungling police procedural familiar from Bong’s Memories of Murder; the comedy, though, and quickly steepens into a calamitous atmosphere in which anything could be unleashed. The village’s suspicions fall on a Japanese vagrant rumoured to have malevolent powers,and efforts to rid the area of him reach frenzy pitch in one astonishing scene. Then, the hunt rounding on the investigators, or Na remarkably shows that he’s been keeping several gears in reserve. The layers of dissembling and self-dissembling pile up so thickly that not only does Na evidently touch on something integral about the nature of evil,but actually seems to be in the process of summoning it before your eyes. A supremely unsettling invocation.
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Source: theguardian.com