In Which We Hear The Wail From A Distant Peak

Old Man In A Cave

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Wailing
dir. Hong-jin Na
156 minutes

Jong-Goo (Kwak Do-won) is a policeman in the town of Gokseong, South Korea. He lives with his accomodating, distant wife and his daughter (Kim Hwan-hee). He cheats on his wife with a neighbor (So-yeon Jang) in his car. The sex is disappointing for all involved, and Jong-Goo is relatively surprised when he is able to achieve orgasm. Shortly thereafter, his daughter knocks on the vehicle's window, and things pretty much spiral downhill from there.

Director Hong-jin Na achieved international notoriety with The Chaser, his debut. The Wailing is structured like a horror film in some ways, but for the most part it is more along the lines of movies like The Witch. This slower pace parallels Japanese horror conventions to avoid jump scares in favor of unfolding tension. In this way The Wailing suggests Na's previous work, yet in a completely different genre.

The Wailing is engaged with the beautiful sights of Hong-jin Na's native country. At times, Korea seems like a idyllic refuge, and it is no wonder that a Japanese man comes to live in Jong-Goo's hometown. Soon after, men and women start to go mad, breaking out in feverish pustules and harming their families in a disturbed rage. Jong-Goo's daughter has the run of the town and meets up with this Japanese man. Soon after, Jong-Goo finds her irrevocably changed.

Jong-Goo's wife hires a shaman (Hwang Jun-min) to give the family some insight on what is occurring. He identifies a local woman (Chung Woo-hee) as the culprit and attempts to perform an exorcism on Jong-Goo's daughter.

The woman places all the blame on the Japanese stranger. "I don't know what to say," the man responds, "You just told me I'm the devil." Jong-Goo can't decide who to trust — a woman he barely knows, or the shaman who tells him not to believe her.

At time The Wailing almost feeds like a reinvention/parody of the Japanese filmmaker Na so clearly admires, Yasujirō Ozu. The environments of the film intrude on one another. Visible walls turn invisible, or fold in on themselves. Jong-Goo moves from space to space and room to room without any expectation of what might allow entry, or make him leave.

Jong-Goo's flailing policework isn't much to watch for the first half of the film. In typical Ozu style, the story takes place around him, largely without his permission, and he never notices as much of it as he should. Such a character is as close to an unreliable narrator as you can have in film without outright deceiving your audience. The second half of the film begins when Jong-Goo enters a room to find his daughter eating ravenously, screaming at him for being lazy when just days before she accepted his gifts and promised to keep his secrets.

It is Jong-Goo's relative unease with the concept of women in general that compromises his ability to save his daughter. The play of the sexes is fascinating in The Wailing. The only true love relationship is the one between Jong-Goo and his daughter, but the lack of faith and trust between he and all the other women in the film corrupts that goodness.

The Wailing is also deeply preoccupied with how much we trust the people in our lives. What they say and tell us in confidence may seem easy to either believe or dismiss, but I don't think I truly understood how much hinges on that fine line before seeing Hong-Jin Na's masterpiece. There is also a deeply disconcerting subtext to the supernatural elements of this story: the frightening idea that the person we confide all our secrets to may not even be a human being at all.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Return To The Congo Jaded And Cynical

Native

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Legend of Tarzan
dir. David Yates
99 minutes

There is a scene early on in The Legend of Tarzan that explains the problem of the entire movie quite succintly. Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) is cresting an African hill, walking on legs so thin he looks like the titular character of Where's Waldo, when he sees a few lions. He approaches them cautiously and then begins to nuzzle them with his head. "He's known them since they were cubs," opines Jane Porter (Margot Robbie). Instead of playing with them the way that children do, roughly, Tarzan only expresses his kindness as affection. That is not the rule of the jungle.

The best part of the Tarzan story is when he finally gets to England and can't adapt to their society. Naturally in The Legend of Tarzan, the man is a cultured gentleman named Lord Greystroke. (I honestly thought this was maybe the movie hinting at being an origin story for Deathstroke, but no such luck.) Ommitted the most amusing part of the tale leaves us with Tarzan heading back into the jungle, where he finds himself increasingly at home.

George Washington Williams won a contest for the most aggravatingly racist name. He is portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson as a man who wants Tarzan to witness how the Belgian colonialists are enslaving the Congolese. It seems unclear why he can't just witness this himself, or why Tarzan has to be a part of the whole situation, and this is never really clarified.

Once they get out into the jungle, Margot Robbie invokes a laughable exposition about how Tarzan loved all the other apes and they loved him. In the middle of the night, she wanders off and is abducted by Leon (Christoph Waltz), but not before she can experience a lengthy memory about how she met Tarzan. To be completely kind to Margot Robbie, she is not really a fit for this role whatsoever.

To be completely unkind to Margot Robbie, her performance is a hot disaster/dumpster fire. Her constant vamping and chattering is unnerving, and she has none of the physical characteristics that would draw such a manbeast. The weird accent she has defaulted to renders things considerably worse. It makes no sense for them to even be a couple, since the real core of the Jane/Tarzan relationship is how they survived together, not their jungle meet-cute.

Jane and Tarzan are apart for all but a few scenes in The Legend of Tarzan, which turns the problem of Skarsgård and Robbie looking more like brother and sister than husband and wife into a minor point. Skarsgård's strength as a performer is in projecting a lot without saying a little. This should suit the character here, but instead we only wonder why there is so much talking they should have called this Glengarry Glen Tarzan. I'll show myself out.

Watching this expensive critical and commercial bomb of a motion picture, it just made me want to see the real Tarzan story, done from the beginning. There is so much that could be included that would astonish, amaze and disgust modern audiences: cannibalism, interspecies love, interspecies friendship, unprotected sex. It is so disappointing to see another white savior story come from this, when the real tale of Tarzan has never even received a tenth of the attention it deserves.

Director David Yates' Harry Potter films were nothing but a mistake, never capturing the wonder of that magical world, and it is surprising that he would even be interested in his material. Tonally, the direction is a mess. Music is very important in Tarzan, with all the sweeping vistas and tense scenes in the dark. Yates plays mostly total silence or lengthy voiceovers over these moments instead. Like many directors, he has fallen in love with Christoph Waltz' tiresome, mealy monologues, and it is not even very satisfying to watch the villain's end.

After Robbie's abduction, Tarzan and George Washington bicker with each other a bit, leading to Samuel L. Jackson screaming, "Take your mitts off me!" The lengthy parts of The Legend of Tarzan where we see Tarzan interacting with human beings come across as atypically dull — he understands them way better than a man raised by apes should. But when Tarzan fully embraces his old life and displays his sizable penis, we see what remains so attractive about the man so wild he cannot call himself one.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Have More Hair Than We Know What To Do With

Dream People

by ETHAN PETERSON

Cleverman
creators Ryan Griffen, Michael Miller & Jon Bell
SundanceTV

Watching Cleverman on SundanceTV this week I was reminded of how completely America has erased its indigenous people from contemporary culture. In Australia, a different state of affairs exists. Aboriginal people are always at the edge of Australian culture, but their mature concepts and themes have a deep influence on how Australians define themselves as the people.

Koen West (Hunter Page-Lochard) has integrated himself completely into this people. He runs a bar with a friend and fucks the guy's girlfriend in the back between serving pints. On the side he makes money relocating Hairies (a native species divergent from humans with immense strength and speed) to secret housing and then reporting their whereabouts to the government, who persecute them out of fear.

Every single character in Cleverman has this potential for evil, and while it would be farfetched to say this is an Australian characteristic, it reflects a basic guilt for the essential crimes against the aboriginal people that the United States pretends to have resolved through casinos and lenient tax situations.

Koen becomes a cleverman in the show's pilot, which among other things gives him the power to see individual's futures through touch, as well as almost unlimited healing. This gift from his uncle alters the fabric of who he is, and gives him a new perspective on his shitty, drug and sex-fueled life.

His primary antagonists on Cleverman carry most of the action, and they are what make the show so much fun to watch. The first is Jarrod Slade (Iain Glen), a media executive much closer than Ser Jorah Mormont to Glen's natural strengths of steely resolve and an unclear sense of what is moral in the world. His wife Charlotte (Frances O'Connor) looks to have barely aged in the nearly two decades since she starred as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park.

The casting of the two as a couple with vague sympathies towards aboriginal people and Hairies makes the de facto Australian point of view. Cleverman features a somewhat light commentary on how we view the various problems of immigration and cultural minorities with different beliefs. Cleary and Slade's waterfront home is a metaphor for how their literal positioning of privilege keeps them apart from the realities of such debates, and the protection of their wealth seems a tad bit convenient for this fractured milieu.

The other antagonist is Koen's brother, the wonderfully certain and slightly demonic Waruu (Rob Collins, in a breakout role). Collins has a young daughter and a wife he cheats on with a white woman. Besides his infidelity, his only crime is that he is not the cleverman he expected to become when his uncle died. The concept of a character who is ruined by being denied one thing - when he has everything else - is kind of Oedipal. In any case, it is somewhat unusual in serial television.

The weakest part of Cleverman is the plight of a family of Hairies who Koen betrayed. Their incarceration by a bunch of vindictive and malevolent prison guards is the only part of the show without shades of grey. It seems too grim an indictment on the Australian people that they would allow torture and murder of any species. Observing these creatures of transparently applied makeup is hard enough without seeing them shocked and bled.

While British shows have found an easier time appealing to American audiences, a more difficult accent, lower production values and a less similar environment have slowed the inroads of the up-and-coming Australian film and television industry. Cleverman hurdles these difficulties through impressive production values, a variety of gorgeous locations and Ser Jorah Mormont and his wife. Initially the political messages seem a little abstruse, but that can be solved over time. 

Despite small missteps, Cleverman's blend of horror and near-future science fiction gives the series an exciting base. The show is noticeably short on action so far, but that energy seems to have gone into showing us all the angles of its conflicted, embattled characters. Cleverman is the only show of recent note that gives me the feeling that actual life conveys at moments – of a difficult slog dotted by brief moments of incandescent beauty and love.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording.