I have been dragging my feet about netflix. My sister has had the service for years, and now and then I would become vampiric, "borrowing" her rentals to watch myself. But it is only recently that I actually got my own account (well, even that is a bit of a lie, I share the account with my roommate, and technically her name is on the bill), and, after seeing his masterful Mother in theaters, thought I'd see Bong Joon-Ho's creature-feature, The Host.
I am an admitted horror-phile. Good horror stories transcend genre fiction, and usually are something more than a few spooks and some dead bodies (I usually use Stephen King and Clive Barker as my examples of horror writers who are incredible artists in their own rights - at some point I'll post a lengthy discussion of King's The Stand).
What is so striking about The Host is how much it fails to resemble a horror movie. If you had to sum up the plot in a sentence, it would sound pretty standard: a mutated fish-monster steals a little girl and her family tries to get her back. The overarching narrative is quite generic, but how the story is told is actually quite radical. Bong Joon-Ho seems to know every beat of how a movie like this should go, and then purposefully misses those beats, or undermines them so heavily that they become something else. Take the appearance of the monster for instance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaxwv1rndPI
This is the third or fourth scene in the movie. It is broad daylight, and the monster is clearly visible throughout the entire thing, which, if you know monster movies, is odd, if not downright wrong. One of the central conceits of a monster movie is that the monster should remain as mysterious as possible for as long as possible - this is achieved to a greater or lesser degree depending on the movie(consider Alien, where the monster is seen for an instant in embryonic form, then lurks in the shadows until the very end - Ridley Scott masterfully keeps the creature away from the camera as it kills off the members of the Nostromo crew, giving us only glimpses to increase the tension and dread). Bong doesn't seem to care that he's breaking convention, possibly at the risk of losing some of the terror he might evoke in us. He wants us to see what the creature is, what it can do, and furthermore how ridiculous the protagonist looks as he tries to battle it. After this scene we immediately know what the stakes are - the daylight provides no safety, and Park Gang-du is in no way a reliable hero.
What I mean by "not reliable" is that we as viewers cannot expect him to function the way the male protagonist in a monster movie generally does. He is not capable - indeed he is borderline moronic - and his attempts to slay the beast involve swinging around a parking sign. The rest of his family is more capable, but each of them has fundamental flaws. Normally in a movie such as this those flaws would send them to their watery deaths, but again, Bong has no interest in convention.
There are only two significant deaths in the movie, one of which is expected (Park Gang-du's father), and one which is not at all. Hyun-seo, the lost child in the midst of all this, does not live to the end credits. This is tragic, considering what we've seen her go through, but it is also unexpected. Normally the adage goes that if someone is her position (someone kidnapped by the monster) is alive for the next scene or two after the kidnapping, she will survive the rest of the film. In fact, we very much expect her to get rescued (or rescue herself, she's quite a precocious little kid). Yes, there's a kind of reunion of father and child in the sense that Park Gang-du gets a surrogate son in the end, but that does not diminish the fact that he's lost his father and daughter to the creature. In fact, by lessening the body count, Bong makes those particular deaths matter all the more, and there are very few horror movies where the deaths of the characters really matter to the viewer.
As I have suggested above, this movie is far beyond its genre beginnings. There are faults - the monster is not particularly convincing, and it is not totally clear why the American government is making up lies about a virus - but the central story, of a family trying to save one of its own from evil, is told in such a novel way that we are reminded why we love such kinds of stories. The Host will certainly be considered one of the great horror movies, but with any luck, we will consider it more than that as well.
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