The Wailing

Jong-goo is a not-very-ambitious police officer in the mountain village of Goksung in South Korea — overweight, easily startled, more interested in avoiding trouble than solving it. A series of violent incidents unsettles the village: family members killing each other in states of berserk possession, the perpetrators dying afterward covered in a rash, their eyes cloudy and blank. The only apparent connection is a Japanese man who arrived months ago, lives alone in the forest, and is rumoured to eat raw meat and walk the mountain roads at night.

Jong-goo's daughter Hyojin begins showing the same symptoms: the rash, strange behaviour, eyes going wrong. Jong-goo investigates the Japanese man's house and finds what looks like damning evidence — photographs of victims, ritual objects, a room that suggests something darker than eccentricity. He brings in a shaman named Il-gwang to perform a cleansing on Hyojin.

A young woman in white appears to Jong-goo before the ritual. She tells him the Japanese man is a ghost — a demon feeding on the village — and that the shaman is connected to him. She tells him directly: do not stop the exorcism, no matter what you see during it.

The ritual is violent and prolonged, Hyojin convulsing and screaming while the Japanese man performs a counter-ritual on the mountain simultaneously, as if the two are in direct contest across the distance. Jong-goo, watching his daughter suffer, cannot hold himself back. He stops the exorcism before it is complete.

The woman in white finds him again and tells him the cost of what he has done. He returns home to find his mother-in-law and wife already dead inside — killed while the ritual was holding the demon at bay. Hyojin is fully possessed. She kills the remaining family. Jong-goo confronts the Japanese man on the mountain road at dawn, a figure crouched on a rock in the fog, ancient and unhurried and amused. The shaman's corruption is confirmed. The village's dead are beyond counting. Jong-goo is left alone with the wreckage of everyone he did not protect.