Movie The Wailing: Discovering A South Korean Horror Flick That Defies The Genre!

During the ongoing age of the pandemic there’s been hardly any activity concerning the big screens and the new hot weekly releases, and movie buffs really miss the coveted visits to the theatres. However, if one is not so much strained about watching movies on computers or on mobile screens then one can still have lots of enriched watching on the OTT (Over The Top) platforms that stream a rich variety of movies from world cinema apart from their much-publicized web series. There’s a concern no doubt for harming your ear drums with continuous use of the headphones; but one can be judiciously selective about it. During such a restrained and judicious practice of wearing the headphones this writer has come across various movies and web series that really kept alive his cinema-appreciation instincts. One such movie is The Wailing (2016), a South Korean (officially the Republic of Korea) horror film, written and directed by the celebrated award-winning South Korean director Na Hong-jin whose earlier movies like The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010) were screened at the Cannes Film Festival and won various awards in other festivals. The Wailing was also screened at the Cannes Film Festival and got numerous nominations and several awards at various film festivals. The main actors in this movie are Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee and the Japanese star Jun Kunimura.

 

The Wailingcannot be described as a ‘horror’ film in one breath, because it has a storyline that covers all other genres of mystery, suspense and of course, horror. And the movie boldly defies the implicit ‘rules and regulations’ of a typical horror film: glorifying gore; capturing the most unimaginably ugly faces of ghostly ‘monsters’; the use of the loudest possible sound-track where a simple telephone ring shakes up the whole auditorium; the jump cuts; and figures moving behind your backs. Instead, this movie has a highly intelligent mix of mystery, intriguing dialogues, a normal sound-track, no jump cuts or sudden movements behind your back, no monsters of the typical variety and an entirely different script for a horror flick. Then how it scares, you will definitely ask! Mind you, it still has all the scares of the supernatural, the occult practices, the possessed and the exorcism, the zombies, a lot of gore and violence without glorifying it though and a whole lot of dialogues that you cannot help but listen to attentively.

 

The movie has a rather intimidating length of over two and half hours, a length that normally is valid for Indian films of any genre, but once you get in there’s not a single moment that’d bore you or make you think of putting off your headphones. It puts you into a persistent dilemma of believing or not believing with the elements of mystery and suspense in full play, and this glorious uncertainty of the plot continues till the very end-frame. And mind you, you may not find the climax as gratifying as the usual horror flicks. The film just flows on with brilliant cinematography and a lilting background music score. The performances are powerful and the storytelling is convincing.

 

The story begins with a police investigation when in a Korean village people start getting murdered mysteriously. As the investigations proceed we come to know that a peculiar sickness seems to infect the villagers: once someone gets the infection somehow he or she becomes violent and ends up murdering all members of his or her family. All the doubts were cast on a mysterious Japanese stranger who lives in a hut in the mountains and local people are telling frightening stories about him. The police raid his hut several times, but still fail to link him to the horrible goings-on. In the meantime a mysterious lady also moves around in the village, seemingly giving leads to the police. The police sergeant of the village Jong-goo, the hero of the film played by Kwak Do-won, becomes terribly emotional and desperate to solve the mystery when his little daughter Hyo-Jin gets the infection and starts to demonstrate odd behaviour patterns, gradually becoming violent. The policeman’s mother-in-law invites the local shaman or the exorcist, suspecting it to be a case of possession. Well, nothing more can be said about the storyline to avoid a spoiler.

 

The Wailingis a horror movie with a healthy difference from the genre, and it can more than match the all-time Hollywood horror greats like The Exorcist, The Omen, The Poltergeist, The Conjuring and so on, and can beat the loud and typical horror flicks in popular display both in Hollywood and in Bollywood hands down. This movie is a must-watch for all lovers of mystery, suspense and horror flicks. This writer has discovered this movie quite a bit late, but still holds the view as expressed. The world of cinema has been a territory vastly unexplored by many a viewer due to lack of access or the regional or the language barrier or of the like and if the film buffs keep on trying they’re sure find many more surprises like The Wailing.

India Register The Lowest COVID-19 Daily Cases In Six Months As The Festival Season Looms Ahead!

For the last 3-4 days India have been registering less than 30,000 daily COVID-19 cases with daily fatalities also reducing. A lot of hope is being generated now as the country has seen less than twenty thousand cases in the last 24 hours, 18,795 to be exact, which is the lowest in six months, and the daily deaths have also come down to 179 fatalities in the same period. The state of Kerala is still leading, but the daily infections that had reached more than thirty thousand recently are 11699 in the last 24 hours and the daily fatalities that had overtaken Maharashtra crossing the 200 mark have come down to 58 in the same period. Maharashtra, the worst affected state in India with over 6 million total infections, has also registered less than 3000 cases in the last 24 hours which is the lowest since February 2021 and the deaths at 32 during the same period. Only two other states, Tamil Nadu and Mizoram, are still showing a rising trend of daily cases; all of the rest of India seem to be doing well in all respects: as per a recent report of the Government of India the positivity rate is over 5% in only 23 districts of the country.

 

To add to the positive scenario the country has crossed the required 10-million mark in daily vaccine jabs for the 5^th time—recently crossing the unexpected 20-million mark on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday. However, to achieve the target of vaccinating the whole country by  December this year the rate needs to be sustained consistently on a daily basis, rather than concentrating on special days to jack up the jabs just to please the authorities examples of which could be seen in the recent past too. No doubt, the Government has been trying very hard to improve its image after the disastrous handling of the Second Wave of the Pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of infected people, but the realities must be faced at all times in a totally non-political way. If the second wave is finally concluding the Government must ensure that the much-feared Third Wave is never allowed to take off. More than 80% of the country’s population has been given at least one jab; but the India-made Covaxin is yet to be approved by the World Health Organization for emergency use, particularly in light of the restrictions imposed rather irrationally by the United Kingdom for Indian travelers. 

There are various concerns though about the future course of the pandemic in India and if it can be controlled till early part of 2022 then only we too can be sure of being able to shake off the third wave and being assured by the ‘endemic theory’ that effectively ruled out further countrywide spread of the virus. Buoyed by the less than 5% positivity rate seen in most parts of the country, the speeded up vaccination and a new vaccine for children above the age of 12 to be available anytime soon, the states are opening up almost completely, this is being endorsed by the experts too. Quite a few of them have reopened schools and colleges and the worst-affected Maharashtra has also decided to reopen schools from 22^nd October and also reopen cinema halls/auditoriums from the same date. This combined with the looming festival season that would last till February 2022 poses as the biggest challenge for the fight against COVID-19. This is indeed going to be the litmus test. The Government of India has sounded restrictions in crowding, particularly in Durga Puja pandals, in districts where the positivity rate is still higher than 5%. However, considering the extended festivities to come we cannot rule out or be complacent about possible exponential rise again in the other states too. Therefore, the overwhelming needs remain to be strictly following COVID appropriate behaviour, avoiding big gatherings/parties and staying away from unnecessary travel or pleasure trips. The next 3-4 months are going to be crucial.

UK Vs India: The COVID-19 Vaccine Vexation!

In the recent cricket Test Series between England and India the 2-1 result in favour of the visitors still hangs in balance entirely due to the fact that a few non-playing members of Team India were found COVID-19 positive which implies that the fifth and the last Test had to be cancelled only because of India’s fault even though not a single playing member of the team got the infection. Now, the change in travel regulations for Indians visiting United Kingdom could be a fallout of the cricket hanger, meaning that the Indians are feared as more prone to getting or spreading the COVID-19 virus with its variants; that India is the originator of the more infectious Delta variant which is again mutating into the Delta Plus; and perhaps also possibly that the handling of the Second Wave of the pandemic in India had been disastrous. Therefore, basically the Englishmen could be feeling insecure with vulnerable Indians loitering around in their territories after sort of achieving the feat of living with the virus and opening up everything including the cricket stadiums to the crowds without the necessity of even masks. They are conveniently forgetting the basic truth that vaccine breakthroughs are possible also for fully vaccinated people everywhere in the world, not just India.

 

What the UK government has done is very wrong, unexpected and absurd: that the Indian travelers, irrespective of vaccinated or not, will have to undergo at least two RT-PCR tests and have to be on 10-day quarantine after arriving there. Apart from the unnecessary inconvenience and exorbitant costs involved, particularly for the Indian students going there to study, this basically implies that the vaccines in India are fakes, and a fully vaccinated person in India becomes ‘unvaccinated’ once s/he arrives in UK. Why? The Indian vaccine Covishield is in fact a licensed product of UK, being the officially valid version of their homemade AstraZeneca vaccine developed by the Oxford University, and in more significantly India had exported millions of doses of Covishield to their country earlier. The fully India-made Covaxin has been proved to be as effective as any other vaccine of the world in preventing at least the serious form of the disease and hospitalization.

 

The Government of India and the Ministry of External Affairs have already lodged a strong protest with the United Kingdom government calling the measures discriminatory and also warned of adopting reciprocal action. If unresolved, this is going to seriously hamper the healthy bilateral relations between the two countries. The UK foreign department has assured India of a relook into it, but so far the discriminatory regulations are not lifted. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also rebuked UK for such actions. However, it is the WHO that has not yet approved either Covishield or Covaxin for emergency use all over the globe despite the former’s link to the approved AstraZeneca and the latter being proven safe and effective. This raises a crucial question about the authenticity of the respective drug regulatory authorities of various countries: are all the regulators only country-specific and not valid for other regulators? This absurd situation must change, if only to give the proper respect to the medical scientists and experts involved tirelessly in the vaccine-making and the approving process in the shortest possible time. And the Indians figure prominently in the number of medical scientists or experts involved in the process across the world, apart from the fact the India has been the largest vaccine supplier to the world.

 

Earlier the discussion had been about ‘vaccine nationalism’; now as the situation warrants we’ll have to discuss about the syndrome of the ‘vaccine superpowers’ and the inequalities emerging out of that with one block denying or not recognizing the other block. For example, the Russian and the Chinese vaccines are yet to be accepted across the globe without WHO approval. Former US President Donald Trump still seems to have the trump card by giving everything, during his last year in office, into the development of the most modern Messenger RNA (mrna) vaccines, namely Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which are available for use across the globe. However, developing countries like India and other poor countries cannot afford these vaccines due to very high prices and the storage hassles. Ultimately, the WHO has to take up such vexing issues as it had earlier made international sharing of the ready vaccines compulsory for all countries.

 

The absolutely wrong and the discriminatory measures of the United Kingdom, almost smacking of racism, must be lifted as soon as possible and the WHO must expedite the approval process of the Indian vaccines and other proven vaccines of the world. The priority should be completely on freeing Planet Earth from the curse of the pandemic in the fast track, and definitely not on rivalries, racism, nationalism and bilateral or international fights or skirmishes.

As per latest reports UK has included Covishield in their list of approved vaccines which would take effect only from 4th October 2021. But to confound matters further the authorities have refused to accept India's CoWin vaccine certificates, and this means the 10-day quarantine plus tests continues still for Indian travelers.