When an American surgeon orders his assistant to dump litres
of past-its-prime formaldehyde down the sink, which leads into the Han River,
it creates a terrifying monster that can swim, climb, and run faster than any
man. During a particularly nasty attack, the beast makes off with a little girl
and the grieving family are quarantined with hundreds of others who came into
contact with the creature. But when the father gets a garbled call from the
girl, the family break out and embark on a callous mission to kill the beast
and rescue her.
One of the highest grossing films in South Korea, and being
commonly referred to as a Korean ‘blockbuster’ The Host (no, not the Stephanie Meyer one) is one of the freshest,
strangest, and most intriguing films I’ve seen. A hybrid in its own right, it
blends B-grade science fiction monster movie with quest narrative and action
movie, with smatterings of comedy interspersed throughout.
The story itself is
pretty generic and very much akin to those somewhat-ludicrous plotlines of B-grade
monster movies of the 1930s and so on, but what is most interesting about this
flick is that it’s not so much about the monster as it is about the family the
film centres around. That and taking jabs at the recklessness and imbecility of
the US, but we’ll get to that later.
What this transpires to be is a movie
about an already broken family that gets broken up even more (sometimes quite
literally), yet they somehow manage to reunify and patch themselves together,
singularly and as a family unit. Each character begins the film with faults and
they are all quick to lash out at each other, but it seems that through the
terror of being hunted by government, an underwater beast, and the thought that
they might not find their little girl lies this thread that they latch onto and
manage to pull themselves together and along. It’s kind of lovely.
Considering
the relationship between South Korea and the US thanks to oppressive historical
events, it comes as no surprise that the ‘villains’ of the movie are American
authoritative figures who, despite their power and station, are depicted as
absolute imbeciles. The surgeon who dumps the stuff at the film’s beginning and
the creepy man with the lazy eye who reveals that (despite the orchestrated
virus scare) there is no cause for contagion alarm, are real pieces of work and
very unlikable characters: the film’s jab at the recklessness of the US
military. Even the vacationing Yankee soldier proves to be a cute, but prize
idiot.
The uniqueness of this movie comes in the form of its hybridity and the
way that it blends action movie with science fiction horror and comedy. It
doesn’t quite play to strictly generic conventions and I find that quite
endearing because it sort of dislocates you from the film and hits you in the
face with these unfathomed surprises that you don’t really know how to feel
about. There is pleasure to be had in a movie that doesn’t deliver the expected
experience of the genre, but a new one that you weren’t prepared for.
Starring
Kang-ho Sang, Hie-bong Byeon, Hae-il Park, Doona Bae, Ah-sung Ko, Dal-su Oh,
Jae-eung Lee, Dong-ho Lee, and Je-mun Yun, The
Host is an intriguing and generically hybrid movie that delivers a
different and strangely satisfying genre experience. Filled with a giant
monster, horror, action, suspense, drama, and comedy, it’s a movie that you don’t
quite know how to feel about at the end, but you know that on some level there
are so many good things about it and that is why you enjoyed it, even if that
enjoyment is not so obvious as the credits roll.
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