What proves fascinating about horror beyond its jumps and scares is a creeping sense of unknowability, a sense which violates our morals as much as it does our prevailing views of the world. Not knowing the location of a threat stimulates the adrenal gland; not knowing the locus of a thing’s malice uncovers a much more primal fear, presupposing a world intolerant to patient reason and understanding. Great horror often confronts this latter unknown, whether a matter of cosmic indifference, warped pathology, or merely evil as a metaphysical precept writ large. Its imitators — not to use the term unkindly — do the same, but fail to leave this confrontation unscathed by the more trivial sins of inconsistency and obfuscation. Trivial these may be, but a good horror narrative is as much an engagement of belief as it is an exercise in tension, and may easily unravel without both.
In The Wailing, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Martín-Calero’s feature debut, a sinister presence stalks each frame, lurking just beyond sight and upending the lives of three very different women. Andrea (Ester Expósito), a college student, is in the middle of a long-distance relationship with Pau (Alex Monner) when she receives word that she was adopted; her birth mother, Marie (Mathilde Ollivier), had suffered from an unspecified mental illness and killed someone, and was more recently found dead halfway across the world in La Plata, Argentina. While Andrea contends with a mysterious apparition, blurrily manifesting in images and video clips on her screen, she registers an equally unsettling sound — the titular wailing — in the heart of present-day Madrid across a dilapidated apartment block. The same block appears 24 years earlier in La Plata, where a film student named Camila (Malena Villa) rushes headlong into a voyeuristic project, capturing a young woman and complete stranger on her camcorder. So do the wailing and apparition, in a triptych tale of ominous terror recalling the hauntings of the Conjuring and Insidious franchises.
Yet while The Wailing does venture to be sufficiently, even exceedingly, eerie at times, its central gimmick lacks clear definition. What is the glue that viscerally holds both Andrea and Camila hostage to a trauma shared across time? The film’s screenplay, co-written by Martín-Calero and Isabel Peña, is scant on the details, preferring a more oblique angle to tease out its palpitating threads. Through the process of excavation, Camila uncovers with her camcorder a dreadful secret harbored by her unwitting subject, just as the viewer is made, through a journey spanning hi-res laptops and home video, to participate in the unknotting of an enigma wrought with red herrings and frequent detours.
Lest this be taken as a refutation of subtext, it must be clarified that the subtext in question hides too often behind the camera’s prop to meaningfully come into being. As an epiphenomenal motif, the wailing’s unseen presence could constitute a loose metaphor for female suffering or its broader societal negligence, but the chief effect it produces here, sans context, is contrivance. Camila’s professor, attacking her hip pretensions, says of her film: “I didn’t get it at all because it doesn’t stir anything in me.” A similar charge may be brought to The Wailing despite its doleful and piercing sequences, many of which hint at the grisliness of malevolent forces operating behind the scenes. That’s just the problem: they refuse clarification, and in so doing threaten to saddle the viewer with a growing irrelevance.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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