Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

Forget the inflated Trumpian moral dilemmas of "Superman" and "Captain America." The summer’s most powerful and most disturbing thriller has arrived, in the form of an intensely atmospheric Korean movie called The Wailing.

CineVue by Martyn Conterio

Not only is the film a compellingly told tale of suspense and terror, but it's crafted with such precision and sense of timing that one can cry "Masterpiece!" without being shamefaced or wondering if a hyperbole-induced crime against all good sense has just been committed.

Screen Daily

Na’s screenplay takes viewers to the root of evil in a manner that subverts expectations and cleverly manipulates cause and effect at almost every turn.

Screen International

Na’s screenplay takes viewers to the root of evil in a manner that subverts expectations and cleverly manipulates cause and effect at almost every turn.

Arizona Republic by Bill Goodykoontz

I love movies like The Wailing. Na Hong-jin’s film is like a genre buffet, with horror as the main course, but a hearty helping of mystery, crime drama, black comedy and family relations on the menu, as well. Don’t forget the side dishes of religion, superstition and ritual. It’s a full meal.

Screen Daily by Jason Bechervaise

Na’s screenplay takes viewers to the root of evil in a manner that subverts expectations and cleverly manipulates cause and effect at almost every turn.

Slant Magazine by Chuck Bowen

Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less.

The A.V. Club by Benjamin Mercer

The Wailing might be a somewhat meandering and nonsensical genre recombination, but that spell never breaks over its lengthy running time.

The Film Stage by Zhuo-Ning Su

Designed and choreographed with stupendous pizzazz, it’s an explosion of colors, noises, and murderous zest that floods the senses, reminding you in a (skipped) heartbeat how frightfully entertaining these supposedly artless horror flicks can be.

The Playlist by Nikola Grozdanovic

The film is a bullet train of laughs, gore, frights and folklore, making the two-and-a-half hour runtime feel like a couple of minutes. Blink and you might miss the whole thing.

Entertainment Weekly by Clark Collis

Despite its epic length, The Wailing never bores as Na slathers his tale with generous supplies of atmosphere and awfulness.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

What makes The Wailing so unusually disturbing is the almost palpable aura of evil it radiates from calm start to sorrowful finish. More disturbing still is the way that evil can seem indistinguishable from compassion.

Village Voice by Michael Nordine

That the film has so many partial reference points only makes the ultimate amalgamation stranger, as the chimeric whole can't be fully explained by its parts. The Wailing enters the world malformed and screaming, as powerless to stop itself as we are.

Variety by Maggie Lee

On the one hand, the film is a gripping whodunnit, exemplified by a scene of classic Hitchcockian suspense, when Jong-gu makes a frightening discovery while snooping around the Japanese man. At the same time it treads into supernatural territory through nightmarish dream sequences that feel unnervingly real.

The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young

As dark and pessimistic as the rest of South Korean thrill-master Na Hong Jin’s work, The Wailing (Goksung, a.k.a. The Strangers in France) is long and involving, permeated by a tense, sickening sense of foreboding, yet finally registers on a slightly lower key than the director’s acclaimed genre films The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010).

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

This is horror filmmaking that's designed to work on you like a virus, slowly incapacitating your defenses so it can build up and do some real damage.