THE HOST
STARRING Kang-Ho Song, Ah-sung Ko, Du-na Bae, Hae-Il Park and Hee-Bong Byun
DIRECTED BY Joon-ho Bong
Opens Friday, March 30
Check listings
Monsters don’t come out in daylight. In Hollywood, monsters get prodded into nooks and drenched in rain during the night. Baring their tentacles at discount underwear models, they skitter through the motions set in place since Alien. So when the monster of The Host tramples through a crowd in daylight, it makes for a startling visual. From here on out, you know the old conventions no longer apply.
The Korean box-office hit The Host is Little Miss Sunshine with a truck-size monster replacing the familiar yellow van. The dysfunctional Park family, consisting of a narcoleptic father (Kang-Ho Song) and his daughter (Ah-sung Ko), a hesitant professional archer (Du-na Bae), former college protester (Hae-Il Park), and a grizzled patriarch (Hee-Bong Byun), own a snack shack at the edge of the Han River. One afternoon, a giant tadpole with legs crawls onto the shores, vomits a tumour and wreaks bloody havoc. During the chaos, the daughter is taken by the monster and the family scrambles to get her back.
Your typical monster movie would have some square-jawed ex-marine and a bevy of bikini-clad models hunt the creature with old-fashioned American gumption and a lot of ammo. Fortunately, the monster massacred the marine, the bikini-clad models and the usual clichés early on. We’re left with a grieving family halted by bureaucratic indifference and a government too willing to defer to its American occupiers. It’s a theme that runs through most of director Joon-ho Bong’s work, but here becomes a canvas for a balls-out monster movie. The final showdown takes place at a protest rally and the beginning of the film, where an American doctor demands a Korean subordinate pour dirty bottles of formaldehyde down the drain into the Han River, is based on an actual incident which inflamed anti-American sentiment.
The Host, though, is not just a monster movie with polemic aspirations. The film exists at the nexus of genres, entwining bravura action sequences with moments more indicative of an indie character piece. Bong seems to delight in smashing emotional textures, making for some astonishing cinema. A typical scene deftly shifts from thrills to comedy to tragedy within mere seconds – you’re still laughing when the heartbreak begins.
The Host is an experience like no other, the kind of rollercoaster ride Hollywood continually promises every summer. All it took was dragging the monsters into the light. |
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