Monday, November 06, 2006
Review: The Host
The titular monster of The Host, the new film by Korean director Bong Joon-Ho, isn't subtle. It's a slimy, rampaging beast that looks and moves something like the Samael creatures from Hellboy, and reveals itself in full daylight early on. The movie itself is far sneakier, starting out as a campy creature feature mixed with dysfunctional family comedy, none of which appears very well done at first. The comedy seems too broad, the monster reveal clumsy and premature. But this story has dark tentacles hidden beneath the surface, which slowly reveal themselves as the movie progresses. By the time it enters its final half-hour, it might be the scariest straight-up monster movie since the original Alien.
The story centers not on the monster, but on the Parks, a family whose patriarch, concession stand proprietor Hie-Bong, is trying to keep his brood of damaged adult children together. His daughter Na-Ju is a champion archer who habitually loses gold medals by hesitating too long. One son, Nam-Il, is a college graduate who, unable to find work in the depressed Korean economy, is drinking himself to death. The other son, Kang-Du, is a slacker who sleeps most of the day while working at the stand, neglecting the young daughter he has been left to raise alone. When Kang-Du's daughter, Hyun-Seo, is carried away in the monster's jaws, what little is left of the family's stability disintegrates. While it's probably not giving away any great secret to reveal that the family manages to pull it together enough to launch a rescue attempt, there's no cheating here. This movie plays for keeps, and things get very grim indeed for the Parks by the end.
Ko Ah-Sung, the 14-year-old actor making her debut as Hyun-Seo, deserves special mention here. Finding herself a captive of the monster in the sewers off of the Han river, Hyun-Seo must go into survivalist mode, and Ko nails the mixture of horror and courage as the situation becomes more and more dire. Her face, covered in the dirt of the sewer, is the image from the film that has stuck in my mind, far more than the slimy monster.
In the best tradition of monster movies, the creature is an incarnation of real-world social ills. As Godzilla embodied the destructive power of nuclear weapons, the monster here is spawned by a chemical spill, one which was inspired by actual events when U.S. civilian contractors dumped formaldehyde into the Han river, contaminating the drinking water. Bong portrays American forces as arrogant and destructive, unbothered by the misery they cause the Korean people, although he does give at least one American soldier a moment of genuine cowboy-style heroism early on. Korea itself is hardly let off the hook either, portrayed as a corrupt country where a disillusioned generation turns their rage at the broken economy on themselves and each other. Nam-Il complains that "I gave the best years of my life to the democratization and they can't even give me a job."
After the credits rolled on Saturday's screening of The Host, and the applause died down, someone in the audience expressed the enthusiasm of the crowd by yelling out, in that moment of silence, "That was fuckin' awesome!" Which I think sums up my feelings on this movie nicely. The Host has been picked up for U.S. distribution by Magnolia Pictures, who will be releasing it into theaters in January. As reported last week, Universal has picked up the rights to the remake.
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