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Film: The Host
Release date: 21st May 2007
Certificate: 15
Running time: 120 mins
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Song Kang-ho, Byeon Hie-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doona, Ko Ah-sung
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Horror/Sci-Fi/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: South Korea
The monster movie has become fashionable recently, after years spent wandering the doldrums, thanks largely due to Roland Emmerich’s 1998 god-awful Godzilla remake. Whilst the SyFy channel still gleefully holds the torch of incomprehensibly stupid B-movies starring giant killer sharks of some mutation, monsters in mainstream cinema have been undergoing something of a renaissance. 2007s Cloverfield took the Blair Witch formula and dressed it up in post 9/11 imagery as a gigantic largely unseen creature ran amok in Manhattan. Most recently, first time director Gareth Edwards has been wowing critics with Monsters, an art house road movie set along the US/Mexican which just so happens to feature leviathan space aliens. Predating both of these films, however, is The Host, a South Korean production released in 2006, which blended a modern sense of realism to the age old monster movie concept with a crushingly macabre sense of humour and, most crucially, a highly emotional dramatic core.
Opening in a mortuary within a US Army camp based within Seoul, an American scientist recklessly orders his Korean assistant to drain hundreds of bottles of toxic formaldehyde down a sink on the basis that the bottles are dusty. After much hesitation, the assistant obliges, and the chemicals are disposed of without a care for the effects it could have upon the local ecosystem of the Han River. Sure enough, six years later, strange sightings are reported around the river surrounding the Wonhyo Bridge, which connects the Northern and Southern districts of Seoul.
Located on the river bank, Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) helps run his father’s refreshment stand. Living on the premises, Gang-du is lazy and greedy, helping himself to the odd squid leg or two, but he is redeemed somewhat by his earnest devotion to his daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-seong). Gang-du is perhaps overshadowed by his much talented sister, Nam-Joo (Bae Doona), a professional archer, but is at least on a par with his brother, Nan-il (Park Hae-il) an alcoholic, unfulfilled college graduate.
What seems like a normal day quickly descends into horror, as the monster makes its first public appearance, running amok along the river bank and swallowing people whole. Gang-du is witness to the whole ordeal, and has the courage (or sheer stupidity) to confront the monster. Unfortunately, the monster grabs Hyun-seo with its tail and quickly escapes from the area. Soon after, the whole area is cordoned off by the authorities, with all citizens ordered to evacuate. After the remaining family meet up at the evacuation centre, mourning the apparent death of Hyun-seo, they are whisked away by the containment authorities after Gang-du openly admits to having direct contact with the creature.
Meanwhile, we are taken away to the monster’s lair, located in the sewers, where we learn that Hyun-seo is still very much alive, though not for long; it is made apparent that she is being saved for a later dinner. In this moment, she is able to use her mobile phone to contact her father who remains confined within quarantine.
What ensues is a quest, where the family is forced to put aside their personal flaws and work together to find Hyun-seo before the monster has the chance to eat her, whilst also avoiding the government forces of the state, who, of course, are the real monsters of the movie...
The Host contains a dose of socio-political commentary. At first, the dumping of formaldehyde into the Han River could be written off with a mere chuckle, as old monster movie cliché, but it is in fact a fairly accurate account of real events that occurred in 2000. The use of Agent Yellow, a chemical weapon used to fight the monster is a reference to Agent Orange, which was used widely in Vietnam as well as Korea in the 1960s that led to thousands of children born with severe birth defects.
There is obviously an Anti-American sentiment running throughout the movie, and the filmmakers are clearly criticizing the South Korean government for being overly tied up with US relations rather than focusing on the interests of the people. This is, however, a rather heavy-handed synopsis of the movie, and it is clear that the movie doesn’t take itself this seriously. During the monster’s first attack, an American tourist heroically enters the fray as you would expect from any Hollywood action star, but he is quickly guzzled up by the monster, a demonstration of the sly sense of humour that is working throughout the course of the film.
Above all, The Host, realizes that people are flawed, and fully capable of moments of crushing stupidity. Much of the movie is driven forward by moments of stupidity or hesitation. Nothing demonstrates this more than the character of Gang-du, a blonde peroxide haired idiot of Homer Simpson proportions. Even when he has lost his daughter, he still finds time to doze off or think about his stomach. Whilst events are specifically and malevolently designed to test and torture Gang-du to the limits, the strength of the movie is in making you root for him and a resolution for this, his dysfunctional family.
The film does have a habit of being incongruous, and sometimes this is intentional - the first reveal of the monster, for example, as it comes bounding towards Gang-du along the riverside in broad daylight. It offers stark and brutal realism; this is how you’d expect people to react upon first sighting of a amphibious monster, and as the scene ends with Gang-du watching the monster from across the river casually eating people alive, it is straight up horror; the likes which other movies couldn’t hope to replicate. Other scenes, however, seem to slide from one tonal extreme to the other. The scene in which the family congregate and mourn the loss of Hyun-seo, is at first emotionally rousing as the sister offers her bronze medal in her memory, but it quickly becomes farcical the further the characters go into bereavement, literally rolling around in a heap bawling their eyes out, cursing one another. It is as if the filmmakers are slapping the audience in the face, telling them to wise up, because it’s only a movie. On the other hand, these moments of tonal imperfection give the first viewing a sense of randomness - you think you have the movie sussed, but, at the same time, the characters could let you down, and everything could be in vain.
During the hype preceding the release of Cloverfield, it was widely speculated that the movie was going to be an American remake of The Host. Luckily, it wasn’t. The Host remains a hidden gem in Korean cinema, as well as the entire pantheon of monster movies in general. A well executed oddball tale of one family’s fight against the state and a giant mutated newt. CPH
Film: Mother
Release date: 20th September 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 129 mins
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Kim Hey-ja, Won Bin, Ku Jin, Yoon Jae-moon, Jun Mi-sun
Genre: Crime/Drama/Mystery/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: South Korea
Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho is no stranger to the time honoured and complex themes of murder and family dysfunction, as attested in his previous work: the brutal police procedural Memories Of Murder (2003) and – perhaps better known – the monster-movie adventure The Host (2006). His newest work, Mother – South Korea’s official submission for the Foreign Language Oscar at the 82nd Academy Awards – sets out to combine these two thematic strands.
The story focuses on the eponymous Mother (played by Kim Hye-ja), a humble herb seller and unlicensed acupuncturist who is very protective over her simple-minded adult son Yoon Do-joon (Bin Won) who regularly finds himself in trouble when following the lead of his reckless, troublemaking friend Jin-tae (Goo Jin).
When Yoon is the victim of a minor hit and run incident with a passing Mercedes, Jin-tae decides to follow the car to exact revenge, leading them to an exclusive golf club; the lackadaisical and forgetful Yoon content to collect lost golf balls in the shallows of a lake as they search the grounds. When the driver – a man of certain importance plus his entourage – are found, a scuffle occurs on the green.
Frustrated over the whole saga, and his Mother bailing him out of trouble with the police, Yoon Do-joon arranges to meet with Jin-tae at a bar for drinks. Jin-tae doesn’t show and Yoon proceeds to get heavily inebriated.
On his drunken walk home, he tries to strike up a conversation with a young girl walking alone towards an abandoned house but has no success. The girl is found dead the next day; half hanging off the roof of the abandoned building. A golf ball with Yoon’s name self scribed on it found at the crime scene, combined with Yoon’s hazy recollection of what happened that evening, places him under arrest as the murderer. Convinced of his innocence, Yoon’s mother goes on a mission to find the real killer…
Assuming the role of detective, Kim Hye-ja’s Mother character makes for an endearing and unique perspective on what could’ve quite easily been a rather flat and pedestrian slice of murder/mystery escapism. However, in director Bong Joon-ho’s hands, Mother eschews many of the drab clichés and narrative traits that usually sentences most work from an otherwise overcrowded genre to the realms of mediocrity, and manages to create something that’s engrossing (for the most part), touching and laced with typical Korean-style dark humour.
To start, Kim Hye-ja’s performance as the film’s titular hero is simply a pleasure to behold. Her quietly expressive nature allows her to walk a fine and difficult line between being a strong and dignified individual who is also a flawed and vulnerable creature. It is a performance that is so integral to the execution of the overall work that for it to be anything less than good would greatly diminish the film’s impact. Fortunately, this is not the case. Supporting performances are also fine. Bin Won’s Yoon Do-joon is able to play simple without resorting to merely playing dumb, a performance that keeps his character’s motivations unpredictable and fresh; Goo Jin’s shadier Jin-tae is also given plenty to do.
While the mystery itself is not particularly spectacular, that’s hardly the film’s concern. Mother is a film about the bond between a mother and son, made strong by a fatherless and borderline poverty stricken family situation; a bond that’s pushed to the outer limits. As the mother’s investigation develops – refreshingly playing down on the usual modus operandi of simply moving from one red herring to another – she begins to discover the lengths she’ll go to in order to clear her son’s name lending to some very touching moments, especially when their troubled past begins to re-enter Yoon’s otherwise unreliable memory. Interestingly, Yoon seems to get on fine without his mother, which, if anything, reflects on her disposition, and suggests that maybe she is the one who needs him.
Bong Joon-ho cuts back on the fun and dynamism of his previous effort The Host to create something which is sombre and mature, but it’s not without a sense of humour - the film’s opening crane shot sees the mother trudging through a field in the countryside towards camera before doing a little dance as the opening credits gently fade onto screen. A concept that re-emerges in the film’s final moments, but this time underpinned with newfound resonance and meaning.
Park Eun-kyo and Park Wun-kyo’s screenplay (co-written with Bong Joon-ho) unfortunately, doesn’t deeply explore the film’s complex and dark central relationship, choosing to make light of the unusually close, almost incestuous bond instead. Both characters share the same bed for instance, prompting raised eyebrows from many interstitial characters. Another moment sees the mother bringing a bowl of medicine for her son to consume as he urinates against the wall of a building while waiting for the bus. The mother offers said medicine after she takes a prolonged look at Yoon’s crotch as he relieves himself, with Yoon continuing as he drinks.
The film’s direction and camerawork is certainly indebted, if only slightly, to past suspense vendors such as Alfred Hitchcock, although, having said that, Mother never generates heaps of tension; an incident that sees the mother silently creeping past a sleeping suspect is about as close as the film gets to anything suspenseful. However, this playing with audience expectation is perhaps Mother’s strongest asset. Bong Joon-ho throws plenty of curveballs, creating an air of uncertainty, which is paramount for the murder/mystery genre; you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen next. Yoon’s arrest turns into a strangely funny moment when the police car is caught in a traffic accident a quarter of a mile down the road. Incidentally, a darker moment sees the mother paying Jin-tae to beat up high-schoolers who may know something about her son’s supposed murder victim. On the flipside, this uncertainty also means that the film feels like its going off course sometimes, but manages to regroup before the end credits.
Despite interest wavering slightly during the second act, Mother is a fine meld of contemporary Korean drama and classic mystery movie and wins, mainly because of Kim Hye-ja’s wonderfully balanced central performance, but also because of its emotional simplicity, leading to a beautifully bittersweet denouncement. Those concerned that Bong Joon-ho was crossing over to pursue box office domination as hinted in The Host can rest assured, Mother is a quietly clever and entertaining work - and comes recommended. MP
Film: Mother
Release date: 20th August 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 129 mins
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Kim Hey-ja, Won Bin, Ku Jin, Yoon Jae-moon, Jun Mi-sun
Genre: Crime/Drama/Mystery/Thriller
Studio: Optimum
Format: Cinema
Country: South Korea
Having enjoyed box office success with the throwaway if fun monster flick The Host, director Bong Joon-ho returns to tackling the sort of heavy subject matter he excelled on with the likes of Memories Of Murder early in his career.
Yoon Do-joon is an impressionable, mentally-impaired twenty-something, led astray by his friend Jin-tae (which sees him rolling around, fighting in the sand pit of a local golf course), and suffocated and frustrated by his overprotective mother, who wants to feed him at the dinner table and sleeps next to him half-naked at night
After a night out where he creates a scene after Jim-tae doesn’t turn up, an inebriated Yoon Do-joon calls out and follows a school girl to a derelict building. Yoon is apparently scared off by a large rock that is thrown from the shadows, but the next day the girl is found bludgeoned to death, and he is arrested by the police and quickly manipulated to sign a confession.
His mother cannot believe her son is capable of such a heinous crime, and believing the police are taking the easy route and fitting him up, she sets out to find the real killer…
The out of context, quirky tone which permeates throughout is set straight away, as we follow the ‘mother’ of the piece serenely walking through a field’s long grass, before she begins an initially amusing yet soon uneasy slow, rhythmic dance in time with the title music. The next scene sees the mother (played by Kim Hye-ja) cutting herbs, the sound of which is crisp and intense, as the camera cuts between her fingers getting ever closer to the blade and her son outside with his friend by whom she’s distracted, then WHAM!, a car ploughs into her son and she heads out in hysterics. These two key scenes are indicative of the director’s joy in leading the viewer in one direction only to throw a curveball, and to quickly jolt the viewer as long periods of calm and sobriety suddenly turn extreme. You never know quite what to expect next and the director succeeds in creating a feeling of uncertainty, so important to a mystery, and more necessary here when needing to distract from several flimsy plot twists and developments.
The director, as we know from success stories like The Host, has a penchant for humour, and this combined with some wonderfully inventive cinematography and unnecessary surprise additions provides occasional treats - for example, when the boy urinates against the wall outside, the camera pans out to show his mother slowly approaching before closer inspection of her offspring’s uncivilized activity. She then begins to feed him as the camera now hoisted above shows his urine trickling behind. Suddenly the bus we were unaware he was waiting for turns up and he runs on.
Given the film’s sinister subject matter, and the overall sombre mood (darkly lit, with heavy storms for the most part), these moments of humour make more of an impression, but are also cheap tricks for a director seemingly unwilling to truly confront or examine the underlying darkness – suggesting an almost incestuous relationship between the pair who sleep together, later becomes a throwaway line for outsiders, although this would have been very important in explaining the mother’s behaviour. We are shown Yoon as odd at best because he’s played too comically, with never a missed opportunity to laugh at his expense (when his friend kicks a rear view mirror off a Mercedes Benz his efforts at emulating said activity only sees him land on his rear). His time in incarceration (where inmates revel in his reaction to being called a “retard”), away from the mother he was apparently so reliant upon, isn’t shown to be difficult for him, and he’s never in any serious anguish, occasionally rubbing his “temples of doom” when he wants to remember events that enter intermittently, and with many inaccuracies.
Given the role isn’t fully fleshed out, and there’s little drama (even his arrest becomes a jokey aside, with a car accident seeing a dazed police officer cuffing and reading him his rights, whilst a large gathering of civilians gawp through the police car’s window – later a police officer kicks an apple from his mouth), you have little understanding or sympathy for the son’s predicament. Your investment in this key character diminished further because of such a powerhouse performance from Kim Hye-ja, stealing every scene the pair share.
As with other key South Korean successes, such as Thirst and Ms. Vengeance, the film is carried by an outstanding female lead performance. The mother’s facial expressions say everything we need to know at times, and she stirs the audience with the role demanding she run the whole gamut of emotions, gaining the strength and courage to investigate given the police’s lazy ineptitude, yet clearly desperate and tormented by her need to protect her son. Her adaptability in the role is indicative of the film’s approach to storytelling, and even if we aren’t emotionally tied to developments, and there’s a criminal lack of tension (even during a scene where she has to creep past a sleeping suspect) as we reach the final scenes, both her performance and the director’s invention are to be marvelled at.
Cleverly crafted, with an old-timey feel (the Hitchcock-style score certainly lends weight to that feeling) and an outstanding lead performance (which has earned an extra star for this review), Mother is another classy South Korean offering, but the director’s unwillingness to explore the characters’ psychosis and some convenient plot developments prevent it being considered a classic. DH
