Thursday 1 January 2009

The Host

Film: The Host, 2006
Director:
Bong Joon-ho
In a nutshell: Much hyped South Korean monster movie in which an eccentric family try to locate their child, who has been either munched or kidnapped by a mini-Godzilla.

Reviews of The Host invariably note that it flouts monster movie conventions. To begin with, the monster itself - a sort of multi-legged salamander, mutated by the hundred litres of formaldehyde poured down a laboratory drain and so into the Hann river - appears very early on in the film, in broad daylight. This of course contravenes the mandate that monsters ought to appear only in glimpses and shadows for at least the first act (if not until the final showdown). The monster is also modestly sized - comparable with a mini-van, rather than a competitor for Kaiji of the Year. But the real way in which The Host breaks with convention is in the care and delicacy with which it treats its central characters, the eccentric Park family who pit themselves against the monster.

There is a wonderfully supernatural scene in this film, and it has nothing at all to do with mutant amphibian monsters. Sharing a meal in their snack hut by the evacuated Han river, the exhausted Park family are joined by Hyun-seo, the lost child for whom they have all been searching. When last they saw her, she was in the jaws of a monster, but here she is, appearing all of a sudden as though having just crawled from beneath the table. Rather than shout in surprise, each family member – wordlessly, unquestioningly – feeds her a mouthful of food from their own bowl.

This is done in such a quiet and naturalistic fashion that for a moment we really believe that she is there. And we feel a tremendous sense of relief. But she is not there: they are feeding rice to an apparition. Not a ghost, exactly, but a phantom conjured by the power of their collective longing. In fact Hyun-seo is alone, trapped in a sewer beneath Wonhyo Bridge, surrounded by wet corpses – in a sort of monster lunchbox, where she has been stored for later consumption. We knew this, we did, but for a blissful moment we allowed ourselves to be fooled. In remembering the truth – that she is not yet saved - we taste the family’s grief. It is cleverly done.

At the end of the film, there is a reprise of this scene, when Park Gang-du feeds the street urchin he has now adopted; this wonderfully real and low-key finale reinforces the feeling that despite having created a bona fide Monster Movie, the film maker's attentions seem curiously directed elsewhere.

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