Haunted By Something Worse Than Your Ex
The Wailing (El llanto) is the kind of psychological horror that doesn’t just want to scare you; it wants to move in, rearrange your furniture, and then sob softly in the dark corner you forgot your therapist warned you about. Pedro Martín-Calero’s feature debut follows women stalked by an invisible presence across decades and continents, turning the classic ghost story into a slow, unnerving meditation on trauma, patriarchy, and the way certain horrors never really leave—just change addresses. It’s stylish, chilly, and quietly furious, with just enough dark humor in the margins to keep you from curling into a ball.
Two Timelines, One Very Bad Noise
The plot sounds deceptively simple: Andrea, in the present, is being haunted by something no one can see. Twenty years earlier and thousands of kilometers away, Marie went through the same nightmare. The two stories echo each other like a long-distance scream, with Camila as the one person who actually believed Marie back then—and who, naturally, was ignored. The connecting thread is a sound: a terrible, inhuman wailing that claws at the characters’ nerves every time they try to face the presence. It’s the horror equivalent of intrusive thoughts: you can’t see the thing wrecking your life, but you definitely hear it.
Three Women, One Shared Curse
At the center of the film are three women bound together by this unseen threat: Andrea (Ester Expósito), Marie (Mathilde Ollivier), and Camila (Malena Villa). Martín-Calero and co-writer Isabel Peña structure the film so that their lives interlace rather than neatly line up. It’s less “A leads to B leads to C” and more like watching three overlapping emotional crime scenes and trying to figure out where the blood trail started. The dark joke running underneath it all is that no matter the continent, the decade, or the specific circumstances, the same presence always finds new women to torment—like patriarchy with a sound designer.
The Horror You Can’t Screenshot
Most modern horror loves a visible monster: a face, a shape, a memeable silhouette. The Wailing goes the opposite route. The evil here is mostly invisible, experienced through sound, suggestion, and the way rooms suddenly feel too small. That choice pays off. The “wailing” itself is a brutal bit of sonic design—less a ghostly cry and more a weaponized grief, as if the building itself is remembering something it would rather forget. The film’s dark humor lies in how unhelpful everyone else is: it’s hard enough saying, “I think my place is haunted.” It’s worse when you have to add, “No, you can’t see it. Yes, it cries a lot. No, I’m not just stressed.”
Violence Against Women As Supernatural Weather
Beneath the apparitions and eerie atmospheres, the film works as a metaphor for the psychological impact of violence against women. The haunting isn’t just a random curse; it feels like the lingering echo of things done to these women—things their societies would rather dismiss or forget. The presence becomes a kind of supernatural patriarchy: unseen by those in power, undeniable to those crushed by it. There’s a grim, bitter humor to how institutions respond: disbelief, condescension, practical advice that has nothing to do with the actual horror at hand. The movie doesn’t have to shout its thesis; it just lets you sit in the discomfort of seeing women blamed for, and then abandoned to, a haunting they never asked for.
Style, Structure, And A Beautiful Panic Attack
Visually, The Wailing is a polished panic. The camera often hangs back, making you scan the frame for something that never quite materializes, while an off-screen sound insists that you’re not alone. The color palette leans toward the sickly and the muted, like reality has a low-grade fever. The structure is deliberately fragmented; scenes in different times and places bleed into each other, mirroring how trauma refuses to stay politely quarantined in the past. Every now and then, the storytelling veers into “wait, what exactly is happening?” territory, but that haziness feels intentional—a reminder that when you’re lost in fear, the narrative rarely comes with handy chapter breaks.
Performances On The Edge Of Breakdown
Ester Expósito is the anchor here, delivering an Andrea who looks permanently two bad nights away from collapse. She sells the slow erosion of normalcy—how you go from brushing off odd noises to bargaining with the emptiness in your own apartment. Mathilde Ollivier’s Marie feels like the ghost of Andrea’s future, a woman who’s already done the whole “no one believes me” tour and has the emotional scar tissue to prove it. Malena Villa’s Camila is the film’s quiet moral core: the one who chooses to believe, and pays for it. Together, the trio make the haunting feel painfully intimate—less like a random curse, more like a family heirloom no one wanted but everyone got anyway.
A Debut That Doesn’t Play It Safe
For a first feature, Martín-Calero swings hard. The film is ambitious in structure, confident in its pacing, and unafraid to leave some questions hanging in the air like spectral cobwebs. Winning the Silver Shell for Best Director at San Sebastián and landing a Goya nomination for Best New Director isn’t a fluke; this is the work of someone who understands both the grammar of horror and how to bend it without snapping it in half. The movie has rough edges—pockets of implausibility, choices that feel more poetic than logical—but there’s an exhilarating “I’m actually trying something” energy that sets it apart from safer, more formulaic genre entries.
Influences Without Imitation
You can see the shadows of other works here: a touch of It Follows in the relentless, unseen threat; a whiff of Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red in the way lives intersect across distance; a clear nod to the eerie social horror of Mariana Enríquez’s fiction. But The Wailing never dissolves into homage. It absorbs those influences and turns them toward its own concerns—women’s bodies, their stories, and the way the world gaslights both. The film’s dark humor surfaces in small, grim details: the awkwardness of explaining terror to people checking their phones; the way bureaucratic calm responds to supernatural panic with paperwork and platitudes.
Unease That Outlives The Credits
This isn’t a jump-scare factory. If you show up expecting a ghost to pop out every five minutes and yell “boo,” you might feel underfed. Instead, the film works like slow poison: the dread builds quietly, the sound design needles you, and the images stay lodged in your mind long after the credits roll. The horror here is less about what you see than the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong—and that no one in charge will ever take it seriously until it’s far, far too late. It’s the kind of movie you think about later, in a dark room, when you hear a noise you can’t explain and suddenly remember a very specific wailing from the theater.
Verdict: Crying, But Make It Cinema
The Wailing is elevated horror that actually earns the “elevated” tag without forgetting to be unsettling. It’s moody, layered, and occasionally maddening, but in the way that good nightmares are: they don’t resolve neatly, and they don’t ask your permission to follow you home. As a debut, it announces Pedro Martín-Calero as a filmmaker with both style and teeth; as a horror film, it offers something rarer—a sincere attempt to merge genre chills with a sharp, angry look at how women’s suffering echoes across time.
If you like your ghosts loud, visible, and wrapped up with a final exposition monologue, this may not be your haunt. But if you’re into slow-burn dread, fractured timelines, and the uncomfortable realization that the scariest things are often the ones no one else admits they can hear, The Wailing is worth answering the call. Just don’t be surprised if, the next time you hear someone crying in the night, you’re not entirely sure it’s human.
