Critics reviews

A smart, offbeat, and competent horror film that effortlessly weaves the ingredients of a well-crafted monster thriller with an incisive, cautionary tale on environmental responsibility and cultural arrogance.

In lieu of the lumbering beasts familiar from Japanese monster movies, Bong and his effects team fashioned a slimy, fast-moving fish with legs, able to wreak havoc on a smaller, more thrilling scale. And yet it's arguably the least of the hero's problems, given the outrageous institutional negligence and incompetence on display throughout the movie. Come for the virtuosic mayhem, stay for the bitter political commentary.

A film both scarier and more original than any recent product from Hollywood.

What’s different – or shall we say, unAmerican – about The Host is specifically what makes it Bongian, and spectacularly entertaining: the scent of narrative risk; the nutso tenor of the social satire, which as always with Bong can spike and nova in the middle of a serious scene so suddenly you’re left rubbing your eyes in shock.

Bong has nurtured a genre premise into smart, fresh, and gripping work that continually surprises with an effortless range of interests.

It is Mr. Bong’s willingness not just to contemplate but also to deliver a worst-case scenario that separates “The Host” from run-of-the-mill horror and may have helped make it a runaway hit in Korea.

It functions as a popcorn movie par excellence, loaded with the most familiar conventions, but shot through with such conviction and visual panache that even its clichés seem invigorating.

As amorphous as its creature, The Host has an engaging refusal to take itself seriously—it's no War of the Worlds and yet, however funny, it is hardly camp. The emotions that The Host churns up, regarding idiot authority and poisonous catastrophe, are too raw—too close to disgust. Is revulsion a form of revolt?

The film has a visceral kick, and an exhilarating high, to match the memory of what it was to see Jaws (1975) on a big screen during its first release. Except that Bong is a much more interesting and intricate director than Spielberg will ever be; and his collaboration with Bae adds a dimension that no American blockbuster can even approach.

Bong, who has a great fondness for incongruously dark humour, skilfully shifts between moods and tones, resulting in a disarmingly offbeat, impressively confident post-modern romp.

If you’re reading this and you’re an a) or a b), I’ll try to get you excited. The Host is everything Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds tried and failed to be: a seamless, rough-intrusion-of-the-fantastic B-movie with a hard and real glint of contemporary relevance and resonance.

The set-pieces are startling. I haven't jumped during a movie since god-knows-when and I jumped twice in this one. And the initial monster attack is so different from what you were expecting that you actually experience actual emotions during a special effects set piece.