A Modern Ghost Story

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MOVIE REVIEW
The Wailing (El llanto)
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Genre: Horror, Drama
Year Released: 2024, 2025
Runtime: 1h 47m
Director(s): Pedro Martín-Calero
Writer(s): Isabel Peña, Pedro Martín-Calero
Cast: Ester Expósito, Mathilde Ollivier, Malena Villa
Where to Watch: premieres on VOD & digital December 5, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: Horror doesn’t always rely on chaos to pull you under, and in this case, it waits patiently and makes you feel the dread creeping in from the edges. THE WAILING embraces that philosophy from its first frame. It’s a film designed around the slow press of fear rather than loud punctuation. By the time its three timelines begin to fold into one another, Director and co-writer Pedro Martín-Calero has built something genuinely unsettling. Not because it tries to scare you every few minutes, but because it treats horror as a symptom of deeper wounds that refuse to close.

This is a story divided across decades and continents, following three women — Andrea in Madrid, Marie in Buenos Aires, and Camila moving between the two through investigative obsession — each encountering the same invisible force that stalks them through camera lenses and screens. The structure is ambitious, but not in a way that asks the viewer to solve a puzzle. Instead, the film invites you to settle into a sense of unease as their experiences echo one another, like ripples spreading toward a common point.

What works especially well is how carefully Martín-Calero handles the connections between these women. Their terror never feels interchangeable. Each has her own emotions, her own reasons to push forward even as the threat becomes clearer. The film avoids turning them into archetypes, which is a frequent pitfall in supernatural horror. Here, the performances give the film weight: Ester Expósito plays Andrea with a grounded vulnerability that makes her fear feel intimate rather than theatrical. Mathilde Ollivier brings a rawness to Marie’s unraveling, and Malena Villa’s portrayal of Camila gives the film its conscience — someone determined to expose the truth even when no one believes her.

The terror itself never becomes overcomplicated. The invisible presence follows rules, but not in a rigid, mythologically heavy way. Instead, the “creature” feels like an extension of violence — cyclical, intergenerational, often unseen until it’s too late. The choice to let the entity appear only through certain visuals is clever without feeling gimmicky. It turns tech into a kind of portal, one that collapses distance and time while amplifying the idea that trauma doesn’t stay contained in the past.

The film uses negative space and sound to create tension that sticks with you. The sound design leans into the wailing — sometimes distant, sometimes overwhelming, always intrusive. It’s used sparingly enough that when it arrives, it gets under the skin. The cinematography by Constanza Sandoval is patient and deliberate, holding shots long enough to make viewers question what they’re actually seeing. When the film finally does reveal glimpses of the threat, it avoids cheapening those moments with excessive explanation.

Narratively, the film doesn’t rush to connect its timelines. It allows the patterns in these women’s lives to gradually show themselves in small details — an image repeated, a sound mirrored, a gesture that appears across decades. This approach not only builds dread but creates a sense of inevitability that enriches the film’s commentary about violence against women. It doesn’t try to be didactic; the critique is built into the characters’ experiences rather than spoken aloud.

One of the film's strongest choices is its portrayal of the intergenerational spread of harm. The story doesn’t frame its supernatural presence as a random entity with arbitrary rules; it manifests as something that clings to grief, guilt, and unresolved histories. The film’s refusal to offer simple catharsis gives it a more grounded emotional core. Horror is never treated as a distraction from the characters’ lives — it’s the embodiment of what they’re already grappling with.

Martín-Calero approaches horror like someone carving out a space where the mundane and the unexplainable coexist without friction. The transitions between timelines are smooth but never perfect, and the way the film blends grounded realism with supernatural dread makes it resonate with you. There’s an aesthetic precision that recalls elements of IT FOLLOWS, but THE WAILING feels more personal, more interested in the consequences of what its characters endure.

If there’s one critique, it’s that the final act feels ever so slightly restrained, as if the film hesitates to let its terror explode. But that restraint is also part of its honesty. Rather than chasing a climactic twist or a massive set piece, the film leaves viewers with a lingering threat — the kind that stays with the characters and the audience alike. Even without explicit closure, the film accomplishes something more lasting.

THE WAILING stands as one of the most distinctive horror debuts in recent memory: precise, unnerving, emotionally grounded, and visually confident. It doesn’t rely on shock value. It doesn’t overexplain. Instead, it creates a world where terror grows slowly, burrowing deeper the longer you sit with it. And when a film’s quietest moments produce the loudest chills, that’s a sign you’re watching something that earns its place among the year’s strongest genre offerings.

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