[Fantasia 2025] FILM REVIEW: The Wailing

The Wailing - Fantasia Canadian Premiere Review

Director: Pedro Martín-Calero

Starring: Ester Expósito, Mathilde Ollivier, Malena Villa, Claudia Roset, Àlex Monner

Written by: Pedro Martín-Calero, Isabel Peña

Produced by: Pablo Bossi, Nacho Lavilla, Juampa Miller, Juan Pablo Miller, Eduardo Villanueva, Jérôme Vidal

Cinematography by: Constanza Sandoval

Original Score by: Olivier Arson

Synopsis:

An invisible entity is awoken and begins to haunt a young woman in Madrid, Spain. But she's not the only one who's being haunted.

Thoughts:

There are some films that you watch and enjoy but never think of again. 'The Wailing' is not one of those films. It is a poignant and terrifying horror film that creeps along at a snails pace then slaps you in the face like a crazed madman.

Andrea is a student living in Madrid, Spain who spends a lot of her time texting or video-calling her boyfriend Pau, currently living in Sydney. She's just found out that her whole life is a lie and that she was actually adopted. Understandably upset she attempts to track down her birth mother only to find out she has recently passed away. And to twist the dagger in even further, her birth mother had apparently been struggling with mental health issues and had just been released from a 20 year prison sentence for murder.

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But Andrea has other problems too. She's hearing strange noises that sound very much like a woman crying and she gets freaked out even more when recording a short video for her boyfriend, he asks her who the person in her room is. Despite being very much alone, Andrea does see a silhouette in the video and later she thinks she sees an old man in the background of other videos to whom the silhouette might belong to.

During a video call with Pau, she witnesses the mysterious old man enter his room and fatally attack him. With the help of her close friends, Andrea is drawn to an unusual apartment block that might unlock the mystery behind the sinister entity that can only be seen through the lens of a camera or video recording device.

Pedro Martín-Calero's debut feature film is a masterclass in building tension. Although the pace is quite slow, I felt like I was on the edge for the entire runtime, just waiting for something terrible to happen. Watching 'The Wailing' was like pulling back an elastic band very, very slowly and aiming it at my face. I knew the elastic was gonna snap, I just didn't know when exactly.

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And that's the beauty of Pedro's film. It's shot beautifully and purposefully and it feels like no frame is wasted. The dread is palpable and I adored how the story was told in different chapters. Three to be precise. Each one focussing in on one young woman's journey in discovering this unnamed and somewhat untouchable evil that is haunting them. There's definitely a resemblance to 'It Follows' and even some tech horror films that came out of Japan in the late 90s, early noughties. But this is so much more than just tech horror.

The middle sequence, which follows film student Camila and her bizarre obsession with the hip Marie, is almost like an entirely different film altogether. It slows the pace down even further and asks the viewers to invest their time in these new characters. However it reminded me a lot of David Lynch's work. The stalking of a beautiful woman. The constant use of the camcorder. The reminder that something uncanny may be going on in the background here. Voyeurism is definitely a theme here. Even though it kinda pauses the momentum that the first chapter had attained, this second chapter adds much needed layers to the story and the third chapter is really just an extension of this one too.

Not sure if this was intentional but when we first meet Andrea she is wearing a knitted jumper very similar to the one Freddy Krueger wears and later during a sequence when Marie is leaving Cami's building, she is wearing a tight t-shirt very similar to the one Chucky wears in the 'Child's Play' films. A fun little easter egg for eagle eyed horror fans.

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Pedro Martín-Calero's direction is so good it's difficult to believe that this is his first feature film. There's a real maturity to how the film flows from scene to scene and how he captures his characters. His restraint is admirable. He is able to conjure up so much terror with subtlety and silence. And the performances from all three of the main actresses are phenomenal. There may not be a definitive explanation to what the hell is going on but there's certainly a suggestion that this evil, that only attaches itself to young women, could be an analogy for sexual assault. Captivating work by everyone involved helps make this a gripping, nightmarish piece of filmmaking.

Verdict: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

-Gavin Logan

'The Wailing' received its Canadian Premiere at Fantasia '25 on July 17th