A brazen exercise in video gamesmanship, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is a monster mash for the PlayStation generation: a direct-to-cinema survival horror that isn’t based on a best selling video game. It comes from a square-eyed world known mostly by teenage boys, the kind of digital fantasy that so often ends up in the hands of Paul Anderson and Uwe Boll. As heinous as those two filmmakers are, video games have generally failed to covert to the big screen on a whole: the differential being that games are interactive and from a first-person perspective, a great masking agent for B-grade story lines (as most of them are). Deny the audience the control pad, and the comedown is rather large. Bong’s outlandish premise may play like a brawny Resident Evil sequel, but he’s downsized the computer programmers for a start. This might just be the best video game adaptation that never was.

Shrewdly, Bong cuts to the chase, introducing the film’s bestial mutation in an instant as it pounces from Seoul’s Han River and devours a gathering of overly curious picnic goers. The ensuing chaos is a brilliantly conceived torrent of mass hysteria: the camera flees amongst panic-stricken bystanders, the utter terror is palpable, while the monster doesn’t beat around the bush. Caught in the stampede, Kang-du (Song Jang-ho) loses his daughter Hyun-seo, and she’s snatched by the creature and as good as dead. As the film begins to masquerade as an allegory for the ‘imminent’ bird flu pandemic (among other environmental/biological/America-as-scaremonger hot-points), Kang-du receives a phone call from Hyun-seo – she’s still alive and ensnared in the beast’s sewer lair – spurring his family into a search and rescue mission, and in need of a proverbial “bigger boat”. Through all of this, Bong picks away at genre convention – revealing the monster so early on is a big one, while the film’s bittersweet endnote is far from traditional – but he’s naturally more subversive in his deployment of humour, while his championing of lowlife is another smack in the teeth of Hollywood’s so-called everyman (Tom Cruise, Song Jang-ho is not). This is at once gravely serious and abruptly humorous: the former a cardinal sin of video game-based movies; the latter this film’s trump card. Granted, The Host isn’t nearly as deft as Memories of Murder, or as spectacularly deranged as Save the Green Planet, and Bong crucially struggles to sustain the adrenaline of a terrific first quarter. And at times its game mythology is a little too clear, as the aesthetic of cinema is tarnished by some occasionally sloppy CGI renderings – if anything making Bong’s film appear more of a video game than he’d like it to be.—Tim Wong