The Host [M] - Korean

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.