13 August 2007
The Host (2006)
I remember seeing posters for The Host long before it ever came out: a single tentacle rising out of the water holding a little girl up in the air. I knew before hand that it was somehow different, but what I didn’t expect and what I liked most was how utterly pathetic the main family was. And you can spend as much time as you like parsing out the various symbolism being thrown around here—there’s really not that much new to say there.
But worth obsessing over are these characters, and how their actions (until, that is, ultimately) have immediate and irrevocable weight. The first instance you see this is when the main character, Gang-du, grabs the hand of his daughter, Hyun-seo, to run away from the monster(1). It’s a great scene, with with an urgent but not invasive score to move it along. Time and time again, though, this Gang-du just has the worst fate imaginable.
And okay, what a silly thing to say about a horror-monster movie, but because these moments are tied to character, they’re absolutely brilliant and brutal. Of course the dad was going to see that play out, probably exactly the same way, but you think he’s going to take his action like a hero, but instead the indifferent monster just moves along, leaving Gang-du and his other family members with ruins of guilt and blame. It’s kind of amazing that a computer animated deus-ex machina can produce such nice character moments. And you see the seeds of loserdom sewn from the very beginning with the sister at the Olympics.
And whether they rally at the end, of course, is probably clear. But their fates are left pretty ambiguous except for two of the characters. And even then, the ending is imbued with an (albeit obvious and somewhat cheap) sense of terror.
1. The nomenclature of movies suggests that the monster is namesake of the movie—I don’t know what “Gwoemul” means in Korean, but how exactly is this monster a host? The crypt-keeper of the sewers maybe, and so he’s “hosting” the girl and her little friend in the nether regions of Seoul, but I kind of doubt that that’s what’s going on here.