26/09/2024 - Pedro Martín-Calero and Isabel Peña present a powerful and disturbing film that talks about the effects of violence against women via a contemporary feminist horror story

Ester Expósito in The Wailing

Andrea is a young university student with a long-distance boyfriend who tumbles into an obsessive spiral when she feels a strange presence. But nobody – not even her – believes her or can see what she is describing with the naked eye. Twenty years prior, 10,000 kilometres away, in La Plata (Argentina), the very same presence terrorised Marie. Camila was the only person who was able to understand what was happening. No one believed them either. As they confront this relentless threat, in different time periods and different surroundings, all three of them hear the same sound that follows them around – a wailing.

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This is the story narrated by The Wailing [+see also:
interview: Pedro Martín-Calero, Isabel…
film profile], the feature debut by Pedro Martín-Calero, which he wrote together with Isabel Peña, and starring Ester Expósito, Mathilde Ollivier and Malena Villa (with the involvement of Àlex Monner). It has been presented in the Official Section of the San Sebastián Film Festival. It’s the tale of three women linked by a curse through the mists of time; a wailing that unites them, and which nobody hears or is inclined to believe. Split into three parts and making good use of the horror genre, the movie talks about violence against women and the profound suffering it causes, as well as the incredulity, the questioning (by society as well as themselves), the madness and the solitude that its victims have to grapple with. It talks about how such violence is passed on from generation to generation but, in turn, how this violence is much more than merely an inherited malediction. It also talks about how it not only affects the victims, but also the people around them, and about how all the damage it causes never ceases and just gets perpetuated. Alongside that, it examines the presence of death in life, the existence of a world that we neither see nor hear, the invisible and the inaudible.

The decision to tell this story from a horror-based point of view is one of the movie’s greatest strengths. Because if one knows how to leverage it clearly and imaginatively, horror can be one of the most poetic ways to recount what is happening to us as a society. This is what Pedro Martín-Calero and Isabel Peña achieve in The Wailing. Indeed, one of its greatest virtues resides in that subtlety, in the ability to use the codes of the genre and the freedom it affords, while toying with metaphors, symbols and sounds. They then go beyond this, turn it on its head and, from a modern-day standpoint, talk suggestively and mysteriously about the sexist violence that exists in real life.

In turn, this decision to tell the story through a genre film also ends up being another of its great triumphs on an aesthetic level. There are some genuinely terrifying images – those evoking a ghostly and disturbing brand of horror, but also some darkly beautiful ones. The end result is a film that is constructed like a jigsaw puzzle which leaves enough room for us to fill in the gaps, or the spaces that its creators didn’t intend to complete, as they confided in the viewer’s intuition and imagination.

The Wailing is an unsettling, cryptic and disturbing film that talks about prominent real-life topics but using an enigmatic approach steeped in the imagination. It’s a powerful feature debut about violence against women, about all that feeds into it and causes it, recounted from a unique and courageous point of view – that of a contemporary feminist horror. It’s a movie that will likely bring to mind such benchmarks as Thesis by Alejandro Amenábar, Three Colours: Red by Krzysztof Kieślowski and some of the imagery conjured up by Argentinian author Mariana Enríquez, and which will probably also linger in the minds of some viewers long after the film ends.

The Wailing is a co-production between Spain, Argentina and France, staged y El Llanto AIE, Caballo Films, Setembro Cine, Tandem Films, Tarea Fina and Noodles Production. Its international sales have been entrusted to Film Factory.

(Translated from Spanish)

Photogallery 25/09/2024: San Sebastian 2024 - El llanto

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Pedro Martín-Calero, Isabel Peña, Ester Expósito, Malena Villa, Mathilde Ollivier
© 2024 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso