A stylishly creepy exercise in psychologically slanted horror from Spain, The Wailing is fresh from its world premiere at San Sebastián film festival, where it won the joint Silver Shell prize for Best Director. A debut feature for Pedro Martín-Calero, who also shares writing credit with Isabel Peña, it delivers great visual panache, tightly controlled suspense, and strong performances from a mostly young female cast. The plot echoes cult contemporary horror movies like Shutter (2004) and It Follows (2014) in places, alongside direct allusions to Polish art-house maestro Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red (1994), with which it shares some loose narrative parallels.
The Wailing stumbles a little in its final act, leaning too heavily on conventional haunted house tropes, spooky jump scares and muddled explanations. Even so, this is still a supremely confident debut with a timely message about violence against women being a real-life. never-ending horror story. Following its San Sebastián launch it next screens in Sitges, Leiden and London film festivals over the next few weeks, with a theatrical release to follow in Spain and Mexico in late October. Genre-friendly trappings, timely themes and glossy production values should ensure it finds a wider global audience.
The multi-chapter narrative hooks audience attention instantly with a visually arresting opening sequence set in a Madrid techno nightclub, where spooky transformations are teasingly half-concealed, half-revealed by pulsing strobe lights. This first section revolves around Andrea (Ester Expósito), a nervy Spanish university student who virtually lives inside her phone and computer. Between regular text conversations with her boyfriend in Australia, which Martín-Calero plasters across the screen in splashy typographical collages, the pair also speak on video link. During these exchanges, Andrea first becomes aware of a sinister figure constantly hovering nearby, a demonic old man only visible on screen, not in person.
After this phantom menace commits a lethal act of violence, Andrea’s life becomes a living hell of grief and fear, never sure whether her invisible stalker is lurking just out of view. Even so, her testimony is largely dismissed by friends and fellow students as mentally disturbed rambling. Shaken by shock revelations about her family history, she begins to suspect she is part of a pan-generational curse spanning decades and continents, with links to France and Argentina. Lured by a creepy siren call of moaning, sobbing voices, she sneaks into an eerily empty apartment in a striking high-rise block, sensing instinctively that this place is the source of the malevolent forces pursuing her.
The second and third chapters rewind the story 20 years, jumping across the Atlantic to La Plata in Argentina. Seeking a subject for her next student film project, sullen college misfit Camila (Malena Villa, an uncannily ringer for a young Kristen Stewart) becomes fixated on French mystery woman Marie (Mathilde Olivier). Apparently motivated by queer attraction, only lightly hinted by the film-makers, Camila begins following and secretly filming Marie. But her risky exercise in cinematic stalking ultimately exposes both women to the same murderous curse that affected Andrea, this time with the ghostly monster a background character in Camila’s films. In an extra uncanny twist, the apartment building from the first chapter appears to have an exact replica in Argentina, which emanates the same horrible compelling chorus of doleful wailing to any unhappy souls tuned to its wavelength.
According to their promotional interviews in San Sebastian, Peña and Martín-Calero conceived The Wailing as a veiled allegory about male violence against women, how abuse and trauma is passed down the generations, and how female victims are often disbelieved or even blamed by wider patriarchal society. These are commendably weighty real-life themes for a genre film to tackle, especially in horror, where female slasher victims and “final girls” are recurring motifs crying out for critical feminist analysis. Indeed, a growing cohort of female directors like Julia Ducournau, Rose Glass, Jennifer Reeder and Prano Bailey-Bond have already unpacked these tropes with wit and originality. The Wailing certainly touches on these broader social currents, but not in a very decisive or conclusive way. A little more faith in these deeper intentions, and a little less fidelity to genre conventions, might have elevated this classy nerve-jangler into a modern classic instead of just a solid exercise in superior Euro-horror.
Director: Pedro Martín-Calero
Screenwriters: Isabel Peña, Pedro Martín-Calero
Cast: Ester Expósito, Mathilde Ollivier, Malena Villa, Alex Monner, Lautaro Bettoni, Sonia Almarcha
Cinematography: Constanza Sandoval
Editing: Victoria Lammers
Music: Olivier Arson
Producers: Eduardo Villanueva Díez, Nacho Lavilla Canga, Fernanda Del Nido, Cristina Zumárraga, Pablo Bossi, Jéròme Vidal, Juan Pablo Miller
Production companies: El Llanto AIE (Spain), Caballo FIlms SL (Spain), Setembro Cine SL (Spain), Tandem Films SL (Spain), Tarea Fina SRL (Argentina), Noodles Production (France)
World sales: Film Factory
Venue: San Sebastián International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Spanish, French
107 minutes
