The Host: Bong's Riverside Monster Movie

Every monster movie has a strip-tease built into it. The rule was set by Jaws in 1975 and enforced by four decades of imitators: withhold, withhold, withhold, show the thing in the last reel when the money has run out and the audience’s imagination has done the heavy lifting for you. It is a good rule. It has produced great films. Bong Joon-ho broke it about fifteen minutes into The Host, in 2006, in broad daylight, on a sunny afternoon in a public park full of families eating packed lunches, and the film has never quite been forgiven for how well it worked.

The setup is deliberately mundane. Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) is a slow, dozy man in his thirties who runs a snack kiosk on the banks of the Han River with his father Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong). He naps behind the counter. He steals squid legs from customers’ orders. His daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Asung) is thirteen and already the more competent adult in the relationship, and she is embarrassed by him in the specific, exhausted way of a child who has been embarrassed for years. Then something drops out of the water and takes her.

Bong’s opening gambit

The film’s first scene is dated 2000 and set in a military mortuary, where an American pathologist instructs a Korean subordinate to pour bottles of formaldehyde down the drain because they are dusty. The drain runs to the Han. This is not invention: it is a lightly fictionalised version of a real 2000 incident at the US base in Yongsan, in which a mortuary civilian ordered embalming fluid dumped into the sewer system, and which produced a genuine Korean prosecution and a great deal of genuine Korean anger. Bong opens his monster movie by naming the monster’s father, and then never mentions him again. The creature is the receipt.

That is the Gojira move, and it is worth being precise about the inheritance, because “it’s like Godzilla” is where most writing about The Host stops. Ishirō Honda’s 1954 film is about a nation that has been irradiated by someone else’s physics and has to watch the consequence walk out of the sea and flatten Tokyo. Bong’s film is about a nation that has been poisoned by someone else’s paperwork and has to watch the consequence come out of the river and eat people in a park. What Bong does with the inheritance is shrink it. Honda’s monster is a national event. Bong’s is roughly the size of a bus, amphibious, and possible to fight with a metal pole if you are stupid enough to try. The scale is domestic on purpose. The catastrophe is a family’s, and the state’s response to it is the actual disaster.

Why the daylight reveal works

Here is the mechanics of the sequence, because it is the reason the film survives. A crowd on the riverbank notices something hanging from the underside of a bridge. They react the way crowds do: they photograph it, they throw beer cans at it, they laugh. It drops into the water and swims — visible, in sunlight, in medium shot, a shape moving purposefully towards them — and the crowd follows it along the bank because they still think it is a curiosity. Then it comes ashore and starts running.

Bong shoots the rampage that follows in long, lateral, unbroken movement, the camera travelling with the creature at ground level through picnicking families. There is no cutting away to reaction shots to hide the seams. There is no strobing, no rain, no night, none of the standard cosmetics of a creature that cannot bear inspection. The effect is a specific and rare kind of dread: the thing is legible. You can see how fast it is. You can measure it against a person. And because you can measure it, you know precisely how badly Gang-du is going to lose.

The choice cost money — the film ran to roughly eleven million dollars, an enormous Korean budget for 2006, with the creature animation handled by the San Francisco house The Orphanage and design work spread across several international shops. Bong reportedly spent the equivalent of a mid-size Korean feature on the monster alone. He then put it on screen, whole, before the audience had finished settling in. The reason this is not a waste is that the film is not built on the question of what the creature looks like. It is built on the question of who is going to fail to stop it, and that question needs the monster fully visible so it can get out of the way.

The family as the real subject

The Parks reassemble after Hyun-seo is taken: Gang-du, his father, his brother Nam-il (Park Hae-il), a former student activist now unemployed and drinking, and his sister Nam-joo (Bae Doona), a competitive archer with a bronze medal and a fatal habit of hesitating before she releases. On paper this is a rescue team. In practice it is four people whose defining traits are all liabilities, and Bong knows it.

The funeral-hall scene is the tonal thesis. Told that Hyun-seo is dead, the family collapses onto the floor of a bare municipal hall and writhes and wails, piling on top of one another in a heap of grief so extended and so physically ridiculous that it stops being funny, becomes uncomfortable, and then becomes unbearable. Western critics in 2006 kept describing the film’s shifts as “tonal whiplash”, as though Bong had lost the thread. He had not. He is filming the actual texture of catastrophe, in which people are absurd and devastated in the same gesture, and the joke and the wound are the same object viewed from two feet apart. Song Kang-ho is the engine here. He plays Gang-du without a single moment of secret competence — no third-act reveal that the idiot was clever all along — and the performance is braver than it looks, because it denies the audience the flattery of identification.

Meanwhile the government, advised by the Americans, announces that the creature is a viral host and quarantines the family. There is a great deal of hazmat, an enormous amount of official confidence, and a chemical countermeasure with a colour-coded name deployed on a crowd of protestors. The satire is not subtle. It does not need to be. Bong’s argument is that the institutional response to the monster is louder, better-funded, more televised and less useful than four idiots with a pole, and by 2006 Korea had recent memory enough to find that plausible.

The case against

It sags. The middle act sends the Parks out separately to search, and their strands repeat the same beat — a Park gets close, a Park is thwarted by an official — with diminishing returns. The film is 120 minutes and could lose ten from that stretch without anyone noticing. The politics are occasionally underlined for people at the back, particularly in the closing act. And a handful of the water shots have aged the way 2006 water shots do. None of this matters much next to the sequences that work, but a revisit should say it out loud rather than pretend the film is seamless.

What it changed

The Host took over thirteen million admissions in Korea, the biggest domestic result the country had seen, and it did more than any other single film to convince international audiences that Korean genre cinema was a body of work rather than a curiosity. Bong had already made Memories of Murder, which is the better film and the darker one; he would go on to Snowpiercer and its literal ladder of class. The Host sits between them as the clearest demonstration of what the whole method is for, which I’ve argued elsewhere in Bong Joon-ho: genre as scalpel. If you are working through the wider field, it belongs early in Korean genre cinema: ten to start with, and it makes a useful double bill with Train to Busan, which takes the same premise — a mediocre father, a daughter, a state that lies — and sprints where Bong ambles.

It is on most major streaming services in a decent restoration and has had a solid physical release; the creature sequences reward the biggest screen you have access to.

Spoilers below

Hyun-seo is alive for most of the film. She survives the initial attack, is deposited in a sewer larder along with the creature’s other undigested victims, and gets a phone call out to her father — which is what converts the film from a monster hunt into a rescue, and which is also the cruellest structural decision Bong makes, because it gives the family, and the audience, hope that the film has no intention of honouring.

She dies. Gang-du reaches the creature, and reaches her, and she is already gone — killed before he arrives, carried out of the thing’s mouth limp, having spent her last hours protecting a smaller child, Se-joo, whom she had been hiding and feeding. The family does eventually kill the monster, in a combined effort in which Nam-il’s petrol bombs and Nam-joo’s arrow and Gang-du’s pole all contribute, and the victory is worth precisely nothing, because the person it was for is dead on the concrete twenty feet away. Bong lets the kill land as an anticlimax. It is the most honest thing in the film.

The virus does not exist. An American official concedes it, in a throwaway broadcast, after the quarantine, after the deaths, after the chemical deployment on protestors. Nobody is punished. Nobody apologises.

The last scene is winter. Gang-du runs the same kiosk, with Se-joo — the boy Hyun-seo saved instead of herself — eating at the counter. The television is showing a news report about the whole affair. Gang-du switches it off, and they eat. That gesture is the film’s real verdict: the state’s account of what happened is noise, and the only thing salvaged from it is a child who is not his, at a table by a poisoned river, in the dark.