AKA Gokseong

Directed By: Na Hong-jin

MVP’s: Kwak Do-won, Kim Hwan-hee, Jun Kunimura, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee, Son Kang-kuk, Kim Do-yoon, Jang So-yeon

Plot: A Japanese ghost curses a South Korean mountain hamlet, turning the locals into blood-crazed zombies. One tired, out-of-his-element, cop must do what he can to save his daughter.

Response: Ghosts shopping for chickens at the local farmer’s market. Ghosts on the number 2 bus, short on bus fare. You kill my dog, I kill your goat. James Franco looking motherfuckers casting death hexes at the hour of the dog. Buddha in the backseat. Devil ghost stigmata. And yea, they did say unto Christ, “are you a ghost bro?” And he was like, “look at my flesh.” At the crow of the third cock would they betray Jesus. Dad life: hard. The lull of the riverbank. Ghost disease.

Review: This one’s a wild ride! I love contemporary supernatural movies like this that operate on a metaphoric as well as literal level but the literal level is all at once, deeply weird, incredibly straightforward, and revelatory of some kinda deeper poetics within the cosmos itself. Other recentish films that do this for me (and that this one reminds me of on some level) include Borgman, Hereditary, Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

One of the things that’s great about The Wailing is how deeply the film is willing to go into the main character’s pain and turmoil. His howling sorrow and rage are unrestrained in a way I feel Hollywood might be hesitant to tread but it always stays on just this side of melodrama, or maybe it’s a hyper-effective, gothic, monster, tragedy melodrama. Whatever it is, it works. The movie drops you, steadily but deeply into darkness.

There’s a deep ambiguity (as well as weird clarity) that’s the point. So while it plays with tropes and images you’re familiar with like cannibalistic zombies, demonically possessed little girls, serial killers with creepy trophy walls, wizard battles, ghosts, cops tracking down killers, monster viruses; its always doing it in a way that’s just a little off-kilter, that might feel like a genre mashup if it also didn’t feel so steady and singular in its vision. The central Japanese curse-giver is a weird figure. For most of the movie we don’t know, is he a flesh and blood ghost? Some kinda devil? The devil? Ancient eldritch evil? Or is he just the product of racist fears projected onto him from the townsfolk? The “ghost in the flesh” figure is one I recall from Edith Wharton’s marvelous spooky tale “Afterward”. There’s a moment in there (if memory serves) where a ghost shakes someone’s hand and this idea of a living ghost (that’s still somehow an incorporeal regular-ass spirit ghost though appearing as solid matter) impressed me very much and was revelatory about the weird dimensions ghost-hood can take. There’s an echo of it here, of course, and it’s bus-traveling, market-shopping, dog-owning, river-fishing ghost (he is a ghost, right?) but also in our Day 17 picture, Sledgehammer. That ghost shape-shifts between being a little guy and a big boi, syrups in and out of planes of reality (so far so good regarding ghostly behavior) but also gets electrocuted, gets into fist-fights, gets stabbed a bunch, bleeds out on the floor from wounds sustained by ghost witnesses. And all of that is more embodied human shit, decidedly unghostlike. But what does that absurdity do to our appreciation and understanding of ghosts? I think these are maybe magical-realist moves and what they do for me is to simultaneously make the magic world more accessible and to deeply weird the waking world.

Of course one of the first recorded mentions of a flesh-and-blood ghost who is maybe not-possibly-a-ghost is Jesus and that portion of Luke is the epigraph that begins our film. Later, the scene plays out in full with a bizarre twist and in fact another scene with Jesus and Simon leading up to the crucifixion and regarding the rooster’s cry is also played out verbatim. One character appears with stigmata. And I’ll just say, they are monstrous stigmata. This was an exciting synchronicity for me because for the past decade or so I’ve been writing monster Jesus stories. Or stories where the report of Jesus is conflicted. I quite like this image of monstrous savior. I guess faith is horrifying. And I mean that both ironically and factually. That giving oneself over to a higher power is probably pretty fucking scary. So yeah, devil Jesus, Bigfoot Jesus, lank-hair, poop-encrusted Jesus down by the river with flies biting his shuddering withers as he roars his pestilence into the open beaks of baby birds, I love this image. And this movie has a monster christ! Opa!

One last thing, what was it? Oh yeah! In addition to watching all these monsterfest I’m reading John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies right now. Tons of synchronicity there. I mean talk about weird porous figures. The bit about the photos (which feels like a moment from Se7en, like a serial-killer noir quote) is echoed by the weird MIB in that book who suddenly take a penchant for photographing their victims. By the way, Keel’s Men in Black feel far more like trickster fairies or yeah, ghosts-made-flesh, than Will Smith and Tommy Le Jones secret government agents.

Also, the cop stuff here, the lines about protection, reminded me of One False Move, which is peak Hollywood moving from hardcore exploitation into crowd-pleaser political melodrama. Great movie!

Background: This is Na Hong-jin’s third feature. His first two were action-thrillers, and his fourth, the brand-new Hope is an alien invaders monster-action chase movie. All his work is highly regarded.

For this one, I read he was trying to cope with many deaths of loved-ones that are happening all at once, and why and how it could possibly be this way.