Review: The Host (2006)
The Host (2006) is a movie I'd heard of many times, and even so, the only thing I managed to know about it beforehand was that it’s a monster movie directed by Bong Joonho. Given his other films, I could have expected some kind of social commentary. However, I actually went in anticipating a monster movie that was unsettling more in the sense that monsters are scary and less in the sense that "monsters" are a smokescreen for cruelty to pass as general welfare.
Park Gangdu (Song Kangho) runs a shop on the Han River with his father (Byun Heebong), and from his intro on he's presented as little more than a burden on those around him. He sleeps hard on the job, his work is half-assed, and his 13-year-old daughter, Hyunseo (Ko Asung), just wants a cell phone that actually works. To further his underdog status, the movie begins with them watching Gangdu's sister Namjoo (Bae Doona) reach for a gold medal in archery on TV, while his brother Namil (Park Haeil) is the only one among them to have graduated university—though Namjoo hesitates and returns with a bronze medal, and Namil is a chronically unemployed alcoholic. Pobody's nerfect.
Enter our monster, the aftermath of the opening scene's dumping of gallons of bad formaldehyde (based on a real scandal where an American military official ordered Korean employees to dump old embalming fluid down a drain), a severely mutated fishy chimera that runs on two legs and grabs little girls with its prehensile tail. At first, it draws attention by just being a giant weird thing dangling from the underside of the bridge. A crowd forms to watch it fall into the water, which naturally is an invitation to throw food things at it to see what it might take—it's a spectacle, harmless until further notice.
In the way of Bong Joonho, The Host is unusual in this entrance. Monster movies tend to allow tiny glimpses, teasing what the monster looks like before a single shot at the end (maybe). The Host doesn't waste a minute before giving you an eyeful, and while the CGI doesn’t age so gracefully, we see it so many times it quickly just becomes part of the setting rather than the mysterious scary thing in the shadows.
The monster exits the water moments later to massacre its onlookers and suck them into its heavily-folded maw, and it's in the frenzied crowd that Gangdu loses Hyunseo just long enough for her to be abducted by the beast as it slithers across the river. Presumed dead, the remaining Park family gathers to mourn her, and it's here that The Host's villain forks into two entities. Following a new demand to quarantine those who came into contact with the monster, Gangdu admits some of its blood splattered onto his face while he fought alongside a foreigner later revealed to be a U.S. sergeant. Overnight there comes talk of a viral outbreak of which the monster is the source, and Gangdu's confession turns his family into lethal carriers of the virus. They comply with quarantine regulations until Gangdu receives a staticky phone call in the middle of the night from Hyunseo, and that's enough to get them all moving in order to find her before it's too late.
From here on they have three objectives: find Hyunseo, avoid the monster, and avoid other people who’ll turn them in. Somewhere along the line the public threat has become this one family just as much as the monster terrorizing the locale. Meanwhile the U.S. sergeant he met earlier is lauded as a hero, and Gangdu is dehumanized to the point that he’s declared completely mentally unstable, with foolish beliefs that his daughter is alive—his insistence of which earns him a fully-conscious lobotomy rather than the help he begs for.
The Host has several layers of social commentary, from the Korean concept of seori to jabs at the American military—in this case, they’ve poisoned the Han River and created a monster out of sheer negligence. In order to rid the people of their monster and the virus—which, *spoiler alert,* is a fabricated coverup for the monster’s existence—the U.S. military intervenes yet again by preparing to bomb the area with their biowarfare ace in the hole, Agent Yellow; and it’s worth noting the resemblance between the gas container and our first glimpse at the monster on the bridge.
While The Host is a creature feature, the monster itself is nothing more than an obstacle for the Park family. Unconcerned with killing the thing, their victory would simply be recovering their youngest member unharmed and going home. They have their differences—they’re siblings, of course they’re constantly ripping on each other—but the one thing they agree on is Hyunseo needing them. At the end of all things, it’s a story about protecting loved ones and staying by their side in the face of adversity, especially when all hope seems lost.
The only question now is if the movie’s title refers to the monster, the host of a virus that never existed, or Korea, the host of an array of disturbances caused by American intervention. Or if it was a premeditated title for the companion piece to 2019’s Parasite, I’m just spitballing. I feel like the last person on the planet to see this movie, but it’s still a pretty big recommendation, like, for anybody. It’s a thriller just as much as a drama, and in the way of Bong Joonho, it provides some serious food for thought.