#nahongjin

Na Hong-jin’s masterpiece isn’t just scary. It’s a spiritual labyrinth where faith, folklore, and paranoia collide so completely that by the end, you’re not sure what you saw—or if you can trust your own eyes.

It begins with a quiet village, a mysterious stranger, and a sickness that turns neighbors into monsters. But what unfolds is something far more devastating: a film that weaponizes doubt itself. Is it possession? Is it madness? Is it divine punishment—or something older, hungrier, and utterly indifferent to human morality?

The performances are staggering. The atmosphere is suffocating. And that 30-minute shamanic exorcism sequence? One of the most intense things I’ve ever seen on screen.

This isn’t horror as spectacle. It’s horror as theological crisis.

If you’ve been waiting for a truly great horror film—one that lingers like a half-remembered nightmare—this is it.

The Wailing (2016)

★★★★★ Rewatched 23 Oct 2025

Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing is one of the most hauntingly complete horror films I’ve ever seen, not because it shocks, but because it understands that the most terrifying thing about evil is how easily we let it in through our own self-doubts.

The film opens with a verse from Luke 24:37–39, in which the resurrected Christ asks his frightened disciples, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds?” That question becomes the spiritual center of the movie. Jong-goo, a small-town policeman and family man, isn’t damned by any grand moral failure. His “sin” is simply being human: fearful, doubtful, and incapable of discernment. When he’s faced with horror that defies logic, he flails between explanations, leaping from skepticism, to shamanism, from medicine to Christianity, without ever truly believing in any of them.

This indecision becomes his undoing. Told to wait until the rooster crows three times before re-entering his home, Jong-goo disobeys out of fear, an act that mirrors Peter’s three denials of Christ. It’s a brilliant reinterpretation of biblical imagery, grounded in both Christian theology and Korean shamanic belief, where the ability to discern between benevolent and malevolent spirits determines survival. The Wailing fuses these traditions seamlessly, creating a nightmare where faith itself becomes the battleground.

Visually, the film is stunning. Damp, overcast landscapes and feverish rituals blur the line between reality and hallucination. But its real power lies in its moral clarity: evil doesn’t need to overpower us; it only needs to make us hesitate. Jong-goo’s tragedy isn’t that he chooses evil, but that he chooses wrongly while convinced he’s doing good.

By the end, the film circles back perfectly to that opening verse, where the frightened disciple who cannot see what stands before him. The Wailing is about what happens when doubt becomes a doorway, and faith falters in the dark.

Joong-ho è un ex poliziotto dedito allo sfruttamento della prostituzione. Quando si accorge che alcune delle sue ragazze spariscono, indaga e scopre che sono state tutte col medesimo cliente, inclusa Mi-jin che si sta recando proprio da questo uomo misterioso e inquietante. Joong-ho quindi si mette alla caccia di Yeong-min, che si rivela uno spietato serial killer.

Thriller d'esordio del regista coreano Na Hong-jin che si basa sulla storia del serial killer Young-chul Yoo,noto come "Il macellaio di Seoul".

Un'opera cupa e violenta che oltre ad essere un ottimo film di intrattenimento è anche una chiara critica sociale che ci mostra l'inefficacia delle forze dell'ordine in Corea. Difatti nonostante la confessione del killer, la polizia arriverà a rilasciarlo per mancanza di prove e questa scelta porterà a conseguenze terribili. Sarà l'inefficienza della polizia inoltre a motivare l'ex detective che cercherà in tutti I modi di trovare le prove per incriminare Yeong-min e salvare Mi-jin. Tante sono le scene adrenaliniche e memorabili, numerosi scontri corpo a corpo, dialoghi spiazzanti, inseguimenti sfiancanti. In tutto questo spiccano le notevoli e intense interpretazioni dei protagonisti Kim Yoon-seok e Ha Jung-woo, quest'ultimo calato perfettamente nel ruolo del serial killer freddo e spietato che uccide le sue vittime con tanto di martello e scalpello.

Un film che vale la pena di recuperare. Attualmente potete trovarlo su Amazon Prime.