Discuss The Wailing
Discuss → Movies → The Wailing → General
Interpretation (SPOILERS!!!!!)
posted by jannSTAFFMOD on March 25, 2017 at 3:42 PM
I'm basically going to spoil the whole movie with this. You have been warned.
I've read posts from that other message board that is no longer, and people have a lot of different interpretations of this film. I think it's a lot simpler than people make it out to be. My personal interpretation:
The evil entity was the devil, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub - that guy. The Christian devil, in other words.
None of the characters were EVIL, but at different times, some of them did bad things because they were possessed/controlled by the devil. I'm not going to worry about exactly when or at what points during the movie different characters were possessed, because I don't think that really matters. Overall:
The Shaman was innocent. The Japanese man was innocent and I believe he was also a shaman. The woman in white was innocent and somehow knew more about what was going on than anybody else.
The reason that they all failed to defeat the devil was because they weren't Christian and therefore didn't believe him. The only one who could have defeated him was the young Christian man, but he was too inexperienced and didn't have the gumption. He went to the priest, who told the main character "The church can't help you." He said that because everyone involved was non-Christian, not a believer.
So the point of the whole thing basically was that the Japanese and Korean characters were fighting a demon from a religion other than their own - so they were helpless.
I've read that the director IS Christian, so it kind of makes sense he would do this in a movie.
I could of course be entirely wrong about everything I've said, but this is how I saw it.
Reply by AdrianChm
on August 11, 2017 at 1:20 PM
I must disagree. There is a strong presence of Christianity in the movie, and it fails everyone.
To sum it up, Christianity helps no one in any way in the movie.
Now, you could argue that, say, the cross did not help because it was too little too late -- but notice that there's absolute zero of any positive influence of Christianity on the demon. You would expect at least some of it working at least a little -- but nope. The director offers no hope in that regards, and no hint that if only the faith was stronger, more true, then maybe...
So yeah, I don't think it was the case of the demon being one from the Christian religion (if it was at all, and I don't think it was -- I don't know of any Christian religion that photographs the dead so they can/cannot be possessed).