Fantasia: Spanish Horror 'The Wailing' Is the Scary Movie You've Been Waiting For

There’s a wonderfully specific and unique kinda vibe that haunts (pardon my pun) the best examples of Aughts-era Japanese and South Korean ghost horror. Anyone who’s seen (as two of the best examples) Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse or Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters will automatically recognize it. Slow, spectral, insidious, preferring to steep the audience in an enveloping sense of wrongness over cheap jumps. Well welcome Spanish director Pedro Martín-Calero to the party, as he nails all that vibin’ exquisitely with his terrifying feature film debut The Wailing. (No relation to the 2016 South Korean masterpiece from director Na Hong-jin, which is way more explosive in its quest for haunts.)

Released in 2024 in Spain, this here The Wailing has only played a few festivals in North America to date—it just played at Fantasia Fest in Montreal and will next screen at the “Scary Movies” series in New York City later this month. Which is to say seek this soul-sucker out if you love to be properly good and scared, because this elliptically structured freak-storm will worm its way under your flesh and leave you unable to turn the lights off come bedtime. Giddily so, if you’re like me—this is the nightmare fuel that feeds horror lovers, reminding us why we keep coming back to the well.

Like the deformed version of Robert Altman’s 3 Women that got locked away in the attic, The Wailing immerses us in the seemingly disparate stories of a triptych of diverse women whose tenuous connections through space and time will become somewhat clearer, finer, by film’s final frame.

Following a furiously disturbing prologue set inside a strobe-lit dance-club—we do love some dance horror!—the film officially kicks off its spiraling tale of woes with Andrea (Exter Esposito), a college student toiling away in Madrid in the 2010s. When she’s not having online sexytimes with her long-distance love Pau (Àlex Monner) anyway. Having just recently discovered she was adopted, Andrea’s found herself in the center of a maelstrom of many a tumultuous feeling. Ones that have put her in direct opposition with her parents, and feeling estranged from her closest friends as well.

Basically she’s not sure where she belongs. So her mood swings convince her to seek some information about where and from whom she came from, and as we all know from many a previous horror movie, this curiosity always ends up a Pandora’s Box for horror movie characters. Martín-Calero (who co-wrote the script with Isabel Peña) does lean a lot on such familiar tropes as these across The Wailing, but the film’s acuity at reworking them, destabilising them, is really something else. The Wailing keeps finding new ways.

As Andrea begins her hereditary deep-dive in earnest, an eerie spectral figure (picture The Gentlemen from Buffy, if you dare) begins to appear around her. And it’s not just her seeing it—the figure only appears on video, and so those nightly online intimacies of hers with long-distance beau Pau become fertile ground for both of them as they each get to have their own “Hey what the f**k is that behind you?” experiences. And these quick little found-footage type scenarios inserted in the goings-on are killer stuff—Martín-Calero has a wonderful playfulness with form that will pop up time and again, keeping all of us know-everythings guessing. And screaming. Never forget the screaming. (Or dare I say—the wailing???)

Remember how in James Wan’s movie Insidious you were wowed when the haunted family did what everybody’s been telling haunted characters to do for decades—move damn houses to escape their haunting—only to discover the ghosts weren’t haunting the house itself, but they were haunting the people themselves? Boom, minds were blown. Well keep that fresh.

So once Andrea’s story steers even further unto terror territory, Martín-Calero freshly yanks the rug out from under us again, flashing us suddenly back twenty years and all the way to the other side of the globe for the next part in his intertwined tale. Here we meet Camila (Malena Villa), a queer film student in La Plata, Argentina. “Queer-coded” is probably more precise since Camila doesn’t seem to even be out to herself, much less anyone else. Not for long though, because we watch Camila begin obsessing over a gorgeous girl named Marie (Mathilde Ollivier) that she spies from afar while riding the bus one day.

And I mean literally “spies”—Camila becomes so fixated on this stranger that she begins videotaping Marie without her knowledge. And then she starts passing these voyeurisms off in her film class as some kind of experimental work! Nervy, Camila! Nervy. Of course one creepy nervy discretion leans into another, as they’re wont to do, and while studying her video footage Camila begins to take note how there’s always a large looming figure somewhere around Marie without anybody noticing it, nor its great big gray-mouthed grin…

Where The Wailing goes from there, as these three women’s stories overlap and echo through time—just what is the deal with that knife-edged brutalist building that they all keep seeing and, more importantly hearing screams within, anyway?—I’ll leave the film to uncover in the course of your inevitable viewing. Inevitable because The Wailing is unmissable for any horror fan worth their dang salt. What matters the most at this moment is making it crystal that Martín-Calero has delivered a spectacularly unsettling ghost story here at his first time up to bat, with some of the finest crafted scares unspooled on a movie screen in ages. Masterful at atmosphere, exploiting darkness and just out-of-reach sound and forcing us to peer into places we really don’t want to and yet—much like the characters—cannot help it, The Wailing is dread-drenched horror movie bliss from start to screaming, wailing completion.