The Wailing

A weird Japanese stranger seems to bring rampant evil to a remote and still superstitious South Korean village in this huge local success for director Na Hong-jin (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea). But the increasingly metaphysical mystery isn't addressed by bumbling cop Jong-Goo (Kwak Do Won) until his own daughter falls sick with the contagion and starts behaving as aggressively as other victims before their nerve-racking deaths. It's an ambiguously convoluted story that throws exorcism, devilish nightmares, a woman in white, magic mushrooms, a hip shaman and zombies into its eclectic comedy-horror genre mix. And the ominous tension, supernatural textures and unsettling darkness is diluted somewhat by the Asian cinema curse of rambling over-length. However, the well-created atmospheres of bleak desolation, shivery seat-edged thrills and sheer-intensity of spirit-world dabbling paper over the more nonsensical sections of the scattershot narrative that does eventually build to quite a chilling crescendo.