‘The Wailing’ Review: A Sensationally Scary Ghost Story [Fantasia 2025]
Pedro Martín-Calero’s The Wailing (El llanto) is elliptical, haunting, and patient. Martín-Calero’s debut haunter, co-written with Isabel Peña, wisely modernizes ghost story trappings with a distinctly feminine lens whose filmic zeitgeist is richly imbued into a generational ghost story. The confidence and visual acuity make for a staggering debut, even amidst the elevated familiarity.
A disorienting, seizure-inducing intro (don’t worry, there’s a warning) unfurls into three intertwined tales of women haunted, expectedly, by a titular wailing. The first tracks Spanish student Andrea (Exter Esposito), an adopted daughter whose good times with travelling boyfriend, Pau (Alex Monner), are interrupted by a figure in the background that doesn’t belong there. It’s not Andrea’s dad, and as the figure appears more and more regularly, Andrea intuits that whatever it is can only be seen when filmed.
Said figure is transnational, appearing several years before in La Plata, Argentina, where film student Camilia’s (Malena Villa) queer-coded voyeurism is similarly disrupted by an unknown presence, often hovering just out of frame. Both Camila and Andrea are looking, though Martín-Calero protracts the suspense for an unbearably long time, only confirming whether that figure is looking back in manic bouts of violence and mayhem. Camila’s story dovetails seamlessly into Marie’s (Mathilde Ollivier), tying the disparate vignettes together in the kind of explosive, supernatural finale that would make James Wan or Peter Medak blush.
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Martín-Colero and cinematographer Constanza Sandoval relish in atmosphere. Claustrophobic interiors and agoraphobic exterior wide shots are imbued with menace. There are conventional jumps and forboding, visual warnings of what’s to come. The Wailing culls heavily from antecedent Spanish horror stories, though it just as often dabbles in the scale of Argento and the jolts of Western ghost stories.
Thematically, we’ve been haunted by The Wailing before—no credit for guessing the voyeurism is really just the patriarchy in disguise—though with filmmaking this electric and confident, intro-level social science can be forgiven. Because, at its core, The Wailing is ceaselessly frightening. The Wailing debuted last year, though it’s making its Canadian premiere at this year’s Fantasia Festival. Among the slate of must-see titles, The Wailing will rank as one of the scariest among them on a pure sensory level.
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Martín-Calero knows when to make you wait, and he knows when to unleash. Stunning, nearly pitch-black sequences are breathlessly tense, and the intermittent bouts of violence are regularly framed as surprises, which is to say, you’ll never see it coming, with every frame containing the possibility of danger for one of the three leads.
As it ties together and wraps the past and present together, sure, The Wailing loses a little bit of steam, arriving at the only destination left for it to go. But that’s fine by me when a movie is this scary. The Wailing is one of the stronger Spanish-language horror movies this decade, and the merging of Hollywood horror sensibilities and the earnest austerity of most Spanish cinema should be more than sufficient to propel The Wailing to international success. You’ve maybe heard it before, but even the best among us can’t help but shudder when we hear a wailing in the dark.
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The Wailing
Summary
The Wailing wisely modernizes supernatural horror tropes with a generation-spanning tale of heartbreak and terror.
Categorized: Reviews
