‘The Wailing’ Review: A Haunting Trip From Spain to Argentina

Thanks to films like Titane and The Substance, among others, horror cinema has finally—and very deservedly—earned the right to compete head-to-head with prestige dramas, auteur films, and period pieces on the international festival circuit. This Spanish production, shot largely in Argentina, had the honor of doing exactly that in San Sebastián. And it handled the challenge remarkably well. Not all the characters can say the same, of course. It wouldn’t be a horror film otherwise.

The Wailing, co-written by director Pedro Martín-Calero and Isabel Peña (Spanish auteur Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s regular collaborator), opens with an enigmatic sequence: a woman in a nightclub dancing herself into a frenzy before suddenly smashing her head against the bar, horrifying the people around her and, of course, the audience. Is she doing it on her own? Is something pushing her toward it? That, in a way, is the question the film will pursue as it branches out into three stories—possibly four—told in chapters.

The first follows a young Spanish woman (Ester Expósito, from Elite) whose boyfriend lives in Sydney; they talk over Zoom. She was adopted, and she’s just learned that her biological mother—whom she never met—has died in Argentina, in La Plata to be exact. The death is suspicious and seems tied to a crime from years earlier, a strange building in the city, and several other mysterious threads.

Just as she seems ready to investigate, her boyfriend spots a strange human figure lurking in the background of one of their Zoom calls—something she can’t see. And then, during another video chat, that masked, old-man creature kills him. She witnesses it, but everyone else believes it was a suicide. From there, she becomes determined to uncover the truth behind this ghostlike presence that keeps appearing in phone videos—while realizing, with growing terror, that her own life may be in danger.

The second chapter takes place in La Plata and revolves around a young Argentine filmmaker (Malena Villa) who begins following a woman for a documentary project. Soon the creature reappears in her footage, as does the ominous building and a streak of unsettling events. The film then shifts focus to that woman—a French visitor played by Mathilde Ollivier—who turns out to be the same figure from the movie’s opening scene, completing a cycle of women connected by the same menacing, seemingly malevolent male presence. The trouble is, none of them have any proof, and—as often happens in stories like this—they’re dismissed as crazy.

The Wailing—its title’s meaning becomes clear near the end—is tense, enigmatic, and punctuated by a few high-impact scenes that earn genuine screams. For all its eccentric turns and the occasionally arbitrary feel of its structure (few horror films can resist making a character knowingly walk into somewhere they absolutely shouldn’t), its underlying logic is quite straightforward. This is a story of invisible, unreportable male violence—one that trails across generations, and perhaps across womanhood itself. Martín-Calero finds consistently effective visual ways to represent it.

Leaning closer to “auteur horror” than to commercial scares, El llanto unfolds largely in La Plata, a city that deserves far more screen time in Argentine cinema than it gets. When the film starts hinting at Argentina’s darker political history, I worried it would veer toward a more literal metaphor, but thankfully it never goes there. The Spain–Argentina–France triangle is held together less by politics than by the universality of gender-based violence. At least, that’s the idea the film conveys.

For all its excesses, implausibilities, and occasionally capricious storytelling, The Wailing works. It jolts, it unsettles—sometimes powerfully—and it makes a strong impression. It’s one of those films that immediately signals a filmmaker full of visual ideas and the ability to execute them. Like any first feature, it has rough edges, but the talent is unmistakable.