Halfway through the folk horror week at this point and the back half is going to be all European but I figured I’d round out the last of the non-Euro folk horror with one from Korea that has gotten a ton of high praise. It showed up on a ton of lists for the best of folk horror and I do love seeing more international takes on the genre. I did not realize on starting it that it would be over two and a half hours long, however.

In the small mountain town of Gokseong, there is a complete shlub of a policeman, Jong-goo, that has his entire world turned upside down as the village is beset by a series of horrifying deaths. Something has been infecting people in the town causing them to gain hideous rashes all over their bodies and go violently insane, killing their friends and family. Everything started when a strange Japanese man came to town and the mystery of what, if any, connection he might have to what’s going on becomes far more urgent once his own daughter begins to show signs of the illness that has afflicted so many others. Now, Jong-goo must unravel the mystery of what the hell is actually going on in a race against time to save his daughter and his town.

I feel like maybe I just don’t have the disposition for the types of horror films that get huge praise by critics at film festivals. I looked up some reviews after watching this and it seems like I’m the only person that fully thought this was unnecessarily long. Which isn’t to say that the movie is bad. Far from it. It’s just packed to the gills with a lot of slowly paced atmosphere that didn’t particularly grab me and an absolute grab bag of ghosts, demons, zombies, shamanism, Christianity, Eastern exorcism. They don’t clash, per se, but without a focus on any particular theme, the movie feels like it meanders around before becoming truly worth it in the last half hour. Almost like it was trying to fill as much time with as many different types of things so it could double and triple twist what’s going on by the end of the film.

I did like the subversion of the standard folk horror trope of “outsider comes to rural place and that rural place is fucked up” by flipping it into “outsider comes to rural place and outsider is fucked up”. However, outside of the times that it focuses on the shamanic rituals, there isn’t all that much folk in the folk horror. The town isn’t small or remote enough to get that good isolation vibe and it doesn’t veer into the whole cult conspiracy that is also a staple of the genre. While the mystery of the movie does make you continually guess at what is going on so that you aren’t exactly bored while watching it, it also didn’t ratchet up the tension and scares until the very end.

If you’ve got two and a half hours to spare and want a slow burn movie with an admittedly great ending, The Wailing has you covered. If you have a fairly low tolerance for watching a cop bumble his ass around being an idiot, then it might not be worth it.

Score: 3.5 out of 5