The Wailing (2016)

Some vintages require patience. The Wailing, Na Hong-jin's 2016 descent into a rain-soaked Korean village, arrives with a 99 percent approval rating and a Cannes slot, and it earns both through sheer atmospheric pressure. A stranger appears, a sickness follows, a policeman named Jong-goo watches his daughter turn into something that eats with its hands. The film builds dread the way a cellar builds mold: quietly, thoroughly, and without apology. We approached it with the full instrument panel deployed.

There is a temptation, with material this rich, to over-read. The Japanese stranger draws suspicion from the villagers, and a careless analyst could mistake folk-horror unease for a statement about ethnicity. It is not. The young woman Moo-myeong and the shaman Il-gwang are devices of the genre, agents of ambiguity in a story that refuses to tell us who the demon is. Chun Woo-hee's performance is fierce, but fierceness is not a program. The film offers no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no casting decisions made to satisfy a spreadsheet. Its concerns are older and simpler: possession, superstition, and a father who cannot save his child.

A clean ledger is a rare pleasure. After so many films arrive freighted with instruction, this one simply terrifies. The final act, with its rooster, its hairpin, its red-eyed reveal, operates on the nerves and nowhere else. We record a null result with something close to gratitude.