THE WAILING Review

Not so much a slow burn as a rabbit hole Alice slowly descends to hell. Each layer of hellred Kwak and his family ladder down to providing a new, more frightening problem to solve. And while Alice's mystery circles the drain, the page never loses sight of its characters. Jong-goo's journey, the stranger's peculiar tranquility, Moo-myung never revealing her cards, and Hyo-jin eating on the floor. All powerful in story and visual. The hectic nature of the frightening events balances against the sleepy village, mirrored in the pacing to the film's benefit. A simple change of a (pointed) stranger arriving can jolt a community awake. As with so many tragic events that can and do happen in real life, the evergreen question being, "How could this happen here?"

And all this before the shaman arrives...

The layers of red turn to crimson, crimson to oxblood, and finally oxblood to a raven's black.

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The above was taken from my Letterboxd review.