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Host – Shudder Review (5/5)

Posted by Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard | Aug 4, 2020 | 4 minutes

HOST is a new Shudder horror movie made during the quarantine. It’s a found footage movie along the lines of Unfriended and it is brilliant. Seriously, this is one of the best horror movies I’ve watched in a while. Also, it’s just over an hour long which is perfect! Read our full Host movie review here!

HOST is a Shudder horror movie in the found-footage subgenre. It was made during quarantine, which makes it even more impressive. Especially since it has quite a lot of really awesome practical effects (that the actors crafted themselves). And yes, since it plays out over a Zoom call among friends, it is very reminiscent of Unfriended . Something the director is very aware of and gives shout outs too whenever possible.

Still, this movie has a very different storyline. And while I did enjoy the Unfriended movies, I feel that Host is in a league of its own. In part due to having a very crisp runtime of just over one hour. It’s brave, ballsy, and downright perfect for this story!

Fun fact: The word “host” actually means “cough” in Danish, which makes it the perfect title for a movie made during the Coronavirus-quarantine.

Continue reading our full Host movie review below and do check it out on Shudder as soon as possible.

Horror at its very best

What I really loved about Host is the way in which it feels real . We’ve all been trapped at home and used Zoom (or another video chat platform) to communicate. Whether it’s for work or just to stay in touch with friends and family. This makes the story even more relatable and familiar than ever before.

Also, while the Host movie is not a horror-comedy by any means, it has those everyday Corona-moments. When someone coughs, you immediately stop and pause. My favorite moment of the movie comes towards the very ending. A woman fighting to survive what appears to be a supernatural element still manages to remember the basic Coronavirus rules of social distancing.

This moment alone makes this movie an instant cult classic. The jump scares should also please even the most hardened horror fans. Not because they’re necessarily extreme or gruesome but because the timing is spot-on!

Host (2020) – Review – Shudder Horror Movie

I’ve been hearing strange noises from my attic, so I called a few friends and went to investigate… pic.twitter.com/CxmJAf44ob — Rob Savage (@DirRobSavage) April 21, 2020

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About The Author

Karina "ScreamQueen" Adelgaard

I write reviews and recaps on Heaven of Horror. And yes, it does happen that I find myself screaming, when watching a good horror movie. I love psychological horror, survival horror and kick-ass women. Also, I have a huge soft spot for a good horror-comedy. Oh yeah, and I absolutely HATE when animals are harmed in movies, so I will immediately think less of any movie, where animals are harmed for entertainment (even if the animals are just really good actors). Fortunately, horror doesn't use this nearly as much as comedy. And people assume horror lovers are the messed up ones. Go figure!

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Rent Host on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Lean, suspenseful, and scary, Host uses its timely premise to deliver a nastily effective treat for horror enthusiasts.

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'Host' Director Breaks Down The Mythology You May Have Missed & That Ending Shot

Happy Spookies!

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Host.]

How good is the new Shudder release, Host ? As a big fan of screenlife storytelling, I'll always have high hopes that the format is loaded with potential, but there’s no denying that it's an especially challenging format to pull off. Throw in the fact that Host was made during lockdown and there's really no denying that director Rob Savage and his team really had their work cut out for them with this one. But, you know what? They wound up knocking it out of the park.

That being said, you can probably imagine how thrilled we were to have Savage on the latest episode of The Witching Hour. Haleigh and I couldn’t wait to dig into the details on the development and production process, but we also went heavy on mythology and one particular thing Savage brought up in that department could change how you view the movie. Given the fact that Teddy ( Edward Linard ) left the call before Jemma ( Jemma Moore ) told that lie about Jack, would he have been safe if he never called back in or did joining the Zoom call in the first place already seal his fate? Here’s what Savage had to say:

“Well, there’s two schools of thought here. I think one thing and my co-writers think another thing. Basically, on the face of it, he would have been fine, he would have had a lovely night unless he had come back because, you know, the transgression was Jemma making up the story about Jack. That allowed something to come into this world and wreak havoc. But, we also wanted this idea that Haley being a character who has performed lots of seances in the past, might already have something kind of lingering in her apartment, might already have something attached. And she might have inadvertently brought it in, and just by the medium kind of conjuring this psychic connection between the lot of them, that might be the thing that allows it to kind of feed on their collective summoning and start to manifest.”

I was very tuned into the idea that this was all Jemma’s fault by dishing out that lie, but that take on Haley’s ( Haley Bishop ) possible connection to some entity certainly makes sense, especially when you also add in this deliberate sound decision:

“If you listen as you go through, there’s actually a kind croaky, weird back-of-the-throat, croaky, crackly interference sound that we use every time the demon starts to show its influence, and we do actually play that sound at the very beginning in Haley’s apartment. So there is this idea of like, there’s something there already, just waiting.”

But back to Jemma being the one to blame here. That whole idea is actually connected to a concept that really exists beyond the mythology of the movie - a Tulpa. Savage further explained:

“It’s like a demon that’s summoned by group think, so the idea is, if everyone pictures the same image in their head, you can actually make something manifest, just by this shared imagining. So the idea is that as Jemma, when they’re in this hyper connected state, she tells them this story of Jack, she places this image of the hanged boy in all of their heads. That allows this thing to manifest and we kind of played all the scares as though this demon is using the image of Jack almost to mock them and to toy with them, so there’s all thing hanging iconography. But in our minds, it was the demon rubbing their noses in it and towards the end, that last shot … you see it’s like half human, but it’s sort of transforming into something more demonic. It’s kind of like its skin is ripped away to reveal something more demonic, so the idea is it’s doing away with the Jack facade and if the call hadn’t cut off there, you might have seen a bit more of what this demon actually looks like.”

If you're eager for more from Savage after catching Host (like I am), you're in luck because he’s been busy teasing a follow-up project. It’s not going to be the same as Host , but Savage hopes it makes a somewhat similar impression:

“I think the way we’re gonna come at it is we’re not even gonna try and replicate that feeling in Host . That feeling came so much out of a group of creatively frustrated people in the middle of lockdown trying to do something cool, letting lockdown fuel our creativity in this way that you just couldn’t replicate. And you certainly couldn’t replicate it if you’re coming at it in a cynical way to try and do a sequel. Our approach is really to do something totally different that still touches on what’s going on and the problems inherent to this point in time and how we’re dealing with our current situation and why things have snowballed the way they have. It’s a whole different kind of approach to this same point in time. And it’s probably not gonna be as immersive. It’s probably not gonna be as recognizable to everyone but I think it’s gonna be different enough that certainly I haven’t seen anything like it. As a horror fan, I’d be excited to watch it. I’d login and watch it on the first day it appeared on Shudder, so that’s as good a metric as we can come up with. All I can say is, we’re super excited about it and we have the same feeling that we had when we started on Host and if that can carry through then I’m hoping that it’ll land in the same way that Host has.”

Can't wait for this next Rob Savage film? Why not check out one of his shorts? You can watch his award-winning short film, Dawn of the Deaf , right here .

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If you’re going to shamelessly rip-off from a classic most of us have seen, at least make it interesting. Andy Newbery ’s “The Host” riffs off of two horror movies many might recognize, Alfred Hitchcock ’s “Psycho” and to a lesser extent, Eli Roth ’s “Hostel.” However, the unholy mix of the two did not pack enough suspense to keep this viewer guessing or vary enough for me to stop thinking about the parallels. For a tale of mystery and intrigue, “The Host” provided neither.

Our lackluster beginnings start with a couple in London at the end of their affair. Heartbroken and frustrated, Robert ( Mike Beckingham ) returns to his work at a bank and takes off an off-the-books deposit of several thousands of pounds to try his luck at a shady upscale gambling spot. After his streak of bad luck continues, he’s forced on a mysterious errand to Amsterdam with a briefcase marked with a Chinese gang sign. Robert finds more trouble ahead when he meets Vera ( Maryam Hassouni ), another suspicious character with a secret gruesome hobby. When Robert goes missing, it’s up to his brother, Steve ( Dougie Poynter ), to find out what happened to him. Usually, I’m a bit less forthcoming about spoilers in reviews, but the plot points are so well-known, I feel that I must mention them.

If you’re already spotting the similarities, there are many. From the Saul Bass-inspired opening credits, the movie closely follows the trajectory of “Psycho” with a queasy addition of a stereotypical Chinese drug smuggling subplot shoehorned in for some reason—like copyrights. “The Host” even goes so far as to lose the main character about a one-third of the way into the movie, something Hitchcock did in “Psycho” that shocked audiences back in 1960. But this is 2020, so even the most casual of horror fans could likely connect the two movies.

On a basic level, “The Host” functions as a gender-swapped adaptation of “Psycho.” Robert is essentially Janet Leigh ’s character, Marion, and Vera is a rich femme fatale reboot of Anthony Perkins ’ Norman Bates, right down to the part where she takes Robert in as an unexpected guest and talks to the corpse of a dead parent. Her bad habit of chopping up guests shares some similarities to the Dutch businessman of “Hostel,” including the commentary on how the rich get away with murder and wanton cruelty. If the references weren’t clear enough, her basement morgue shares the same grimy shade of green and blinking fluorescent lights as some of the “ Saw ” movies. “The Host” only briefly veers into torture and gore before returning to the “Psycho”-inspired mystery.

The issue is not so much that Newbery so closely traces a few of his favorite filmmakers. It’s that he doesn’t do a very good job of making the material his own. A number of the scenes feel flat, and the images of cinematographer Oona Menges look like an unremarkable TV movie, like when a visit to a police station looks as if only one cop is seated in an empty room. The script shares three screenwriters—Finola Geraghty, Brendan Bishop and Laurence Lamers—yet the dialogue and plot sound like it’s still in the draft stages. There are some obvious coincidences and plot holes that made me groan, like how one of the characters knew just where to look for the ground-up bodies of victims, taking out any possibility of suspense. The cast seems like they’re still in rehearsal, figuring out the lines and natural rhythms, but these are the takes Newbery chooses to keep in the movie. This is especially painful in moments like a relative of Vera is shown a photo of the corpse she’s kept in the house and he reacts with the energy of someone checking the weather.

For this movie to surprise you, you almost need to have never seen a horror movie before. There are simply not enough thrills in “The Host” to offset its pedestrian missteps. It’s fine if a filmmaker wants to pay homage to their creative inspirations—directors as varied as Mel Brooks , Quentin Tarantino and even Brian De Palma have made careers out of referencing other filmmakers—but at some point, a movie has to stand outside of the shadows of its influences. The Host” never does.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to RogerEbert.com .

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Film Credits

The Host (2020)

Rated R for some bloody violence, sexuality and language.

102 minutes

Maryam Hassouni as Vera Tribbe

Mike Beckingham as Robert Atkinson

Dougie Poynter as Steve Atkinson

Nigel Barber as Herbert Summers

Suan-Li Ong as Jun Hui

Togo Igawa as Lau Hoi Ho

Andy Newbery

Writer (based on a story by)

Laurence Lamers

Writer (adapted by)

Zachary Weckstein
Finola Geraghty
Brendan Bishop

Cinematographer

Oona Menges
Julien Leloup
Wan Pin Chu

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Bong Joon-ho’s ‘The Host’ Is The Defining Monster Movie Of The 21st Century

David ehrlich.

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All of Bong Joon-ho ’s movies are about monsters, some more literally than others. In “Memories of Murder,” the monster is the boogeyman, ripped from the headlines and hiding in the darkness. In “Snowpiercer,” the monster is the abstract force of capitalism, rotting us from the inside out as we eat each other to survive and maintain some semblance of order at the end of the world. And in “ The Host ,” the wild 2006 genre mash-up that firmly established Bong as a creative force of nature and afforded him the cache to make “Mother” in 2009, the monster is… well, it’s an actual fucking monster , with slimy skin and a prehensile tail and a sweet tooth for small children.

The special effects haven’t aged particularly well, but the creature — which Bong and his team modeled after Steve Buscemi’s feral performance in “Fargo” — is nevertheless a marvelous creation. An overgrown sewer chimera whose mouth has so many strange folds that you’re still trying to make sense of them all at the end of the movie (it’s more important that a CG villain be curious than convincing), the monster is scary and silly in equal measure, unpredictable to the bitter end. You never know where it’s going to pop up, or what might be the next thing to come retching out of its multi-layered maw. And yet, the most unpredictable thing about this gnarly digital wonder is that “The Host” actually lets us look at it.

At the time it seemed perfectly natural that Bong was swinging for the fences and making a monster movie that followed in Godzilla’s thunderous footsteps, that took advantage of new technology to comment on the uncertain future of an Asian country that was still trying to add up the aftermath of its most recent war. But, in the years since, Bong has revealed himself to be a master of misdirection, and his subsequent films have galvanized a body of work that hinges on the mordant genius with which he uses genre tropes like sleight-of-hand.

In that light, it now seems kinda bizarre — if not downright counterproductive — that Bong would make up an actual monster when the rest of his films offer such compelling evidence that monsters are real. That, in a decision that has come to define the film, he would put the monster front and center during the first reel.

What does he want us to see during the famous opening sequence in which he subverts decades of creature feature tradition by ringing Buscemi (just roll with it) into full daylight and revealing the thing in its all of its slickly rendered glory? Why is “The Host” so quick to (forgive me) normalize its beast, framing it in so many elegant wide-shots that it soon becomes just another part of the landscape? Is the monster just a mucus-covered McGuffin to set up a darkly dysfunctional comedy about a lower-middle-class Korean family trying to rescue their youngest member, or is the film’s vague and scattered political commentary meant to coalesce into something more specific than “it’s better to trust the black sheep of your family than to ever believe in what the government tells you?”

From its pointed prologue (which builds off a real-life incident to broadly criticize the toxic effects of America’s lingering military presence in Korea) to its heavy-handed allusions towards WMDs and the Iraq War, “The Host” has never been a particularly subtle movie. And that’s always seemed like part of its charm. Per Bong tradition, its characters are complete idiots who tend towards slapstick, an assessment that’s as true of Song Kang-ho ’s bumbling burnout of a hero as it is of the shady official who shows up in a hazmat suit and promptly falls on his ass. But now — as the special effects start to show their age and it’s easier to see the monster for what it really is — Bong’s masterpiece is finally beginning to reveal its true form.

A lack of subtlety isn’t just one of the film’s charms, it’s also the core of the film’s purpose. This is a story about the sheer brazenness of evil. It’s a story about an evil that pours formaldehyde into the Han River with the snickering delight of a Bond villain, a story about an evil that hangs from the underside of the most prominent bridge in all of Seoul before it decides to strike.

It’s a story about an evil that doesn’t even pretend to be anything else, about state forces who immediately pounce on the opportunity to punish their country’s most vulnerable citizens, and about creepy scientists they fly in openly brag about how they’re going to lobotomize Song’s character just to shut him up. It’s a story about how a people are only as strong as the protection they offer the weakest among them, Bong’s screenplay starting in a riverside food shack and going full Dickens by the time it introduces two lost orphans into the mix.

If “The Host” has only continued to grow into its role as the defining monster movie of the 21st Century, it’s not because of the film’s conspiratorial flair or its digs at the media, it’s because it’s the only recent monster movie that doesn’t feel like a metaphor for something else. Sometimes, the danger really is that obvious. Sometimes — if I can indulge in a crazy what-if scenario, here — a racist President who promises to shit on the Constitution, violate the Emoluments clause, strip people of their rights (and their healthcare), and run the world’s most stable democracy like an autocratic family business isn’t just one side of an argument, but rather a clear and present danger that’s coming for you and the ones you love. Hypothetically. Sometimes a bipedal fish nightmare modeled after Steve Buscemi is just a bipedal fish nightmare modeled after Steve Buscemi.

As the film makes viscerally clear during the long slo-mo shots that define the incredible scene where its creature runs along the riverbanks and stuffs random people into its maw, the hardest part about surviving something so extreme is recognizing that it’s real and responding in kind. The world may be a more cynical place than ever, but our relative stability has made it difficult for people to believe in monsters, or to be prepared to retaliate against them when they emerge from the darkness fully formed. It hardly matters that the creature in “The Host” doesn’t look as impressive as it used to, it only matters that we see it for what it is. Because how the hell else are we supposed to fight back?

Fortunately for us, Bong Joon-ho is about to unleash another movie .

“The Host” is available to stream on Netflix Instant.

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Host (2020) Ending, Explained

With the Covid-19 pandemic in its backdrop, Rob Savage’s ‘Host’ derives opportunity from adversity. The film entirely takes place in a zoom call meeting and is replete with jumpscares with little to no plot developments. Still, for a movie that barely stays with you for an hour, ‘Host’ effectively instills chills that will undoubtedly keep you up all night. With that said, if you’ve watched the film, here’s a detailed explanation of its ending and its inspirations.

Plot Summary

‘Host’ centers on six friends who arrange a zoom call with a séance practitioner in the hope that they’ll be able to experience something paranormal during the Covid-19 lockdown. Unfortunately for them, things don’t go as planned, and what starts as a fun paranormal experience later turns into something far more sinister.

The Ending: Whose Fault Was It?

When it comes to the overarching storyline of ‘Host,’ it isn’t as twisted and convoluted as most other horror films out there. Even so, in its flaccid runtime of one hour, the film does a whole lot of foreshadowing and also leaves viewers with a little ambiguity. The biggest question that the ending of the movie leaves a viewer with is—who summoned the ghost in the first place? In the opening scene, it is established that Haley, who came up with the idea of setting up a meeting with the séance practitioner, had previously done something like this before. The film also hints that Haley’s home could be haunted even before the zoom meeting.

However, later in the movie, when their meeting begins, Gemma lies about experiencing something paranormal in her room and says that the ghostly presence claims to be Jack, a boy from her school who hung himself. This is when the practitioner warns them that lies not only insults these spirits but also allows them to become a manifestation of the lies. As a result, although Gemma’s story was not real, her lies manifested a demonic spirit that embodied Jack. So considering Gemma and Haley’s take on the paranormal, it seems like both were at fault.

Haley had already summoned the spirit through her past experiences with séance. But it was Gemma’s lie that tapped on the collective unconscious/thoughts of the entire group, due to which the demonic spirit gained full access to their realm and acquired a physical form to haunt them.

Many deaths of the film allude to Gemma’s description of Jack. At first, when Caroline heads over to her attic after hearing loud noises coming out of it, her laptop’s camera shows a pair of feet hanging down from the ceiling. In this scene, the movie first foreshadows that the demonic entity is haunting them by recreating what they manifested. Later on in the film, Haley clicks a polaroid picture of her living room and again finds a ghostly figure hanging from her ceiling. Towards the end, both Redina’s husband and Teddy’s girlfriend are hung to death, suggesting that the demon has become “Jack.”

Would Teddy Survive if he Never Joined the Meeting?

Teddy leaves the meeting much before the girls begin the séance. However, towards the end of the film, he, too, joins the zoom session and encounters the same fate as everyone else. As a viewer, you can’t help but wonder if Teddy would have survived if only he had stayed away from the meeting. Although it seems pretty apparent that he only becomes a victim of the ghost after he joins the meeting, the early scenes of the movie suggest that his fate was already sealed. In one of the opening scenes, Teddy shows a creepy music box to the girls and even blows off some smoke on it while playing its music. In the closing moments, Teddy finds the same music box in his garage after being chased down by the spirit and then magically catches fire and dies. These two parallels suggest that the ghost was with them long before Gemma started making up stories.

Folklore in Host, Explained

Although it isn’t directly implied anywhere in the film, the film’s representation of the ghost seems to allude to a mystical practice known as Collective Thougtforms/Tulpa, through which one can bring thoughts to life. Now, creating a Tulpa is almost like creating an imaginary friend, with the only difference being that the imaginary friend has its own thought process. Think something along the lines of Tyler Durden from ‘ Fight Club ‘ or Freddy Krueger from ‘Nightmare on Elm Street.’ Speaking of ‘Fight Club,’ one may recall how the voices in the narrator’s head keep referring to him as Jack. “Jack’s smirking revenge,” the voice says. Coincidentally, even the tulpa portrayed in ‘Host’ is named Jack.

Pop Culture References

As many viewers would be able to tell, the film uses the current situation of the world to instill scares. Even in the movie’s setup, the characters choose to get together on a zoom meeting because the Covid-19 situation does not allow them to meet in person. By doing this, the film also shows the kind of helplessness that comes with the pandemic. When the possessions of the ghost begin, all the girls are together in the zoom meeting, but they feel helpless because there’s nothing they can do to save each other. And of course, going out of their homes isn’t a viable option either.

Along with that, the movie also uses several features of the zoom application to instill timely jumpscares. For instance, in Alice’s case, the film uses mask filters to scare viewers, and in Caroline’s case, it uses the popular Zoom background loop. Other than that, the movie’s mask sequences pay homage to another cult horror film, titled ‘Alice Sweet Alice.’ Similarly, even the polaroid scene draws its inspiration from ‘Lake Mungo.’ In the closing moments, when almost all the characters are dead, Haley’s chatbox says that she has 13 unread messages. The number 13, again, is just a metaphor for all the superstitions surrounding the unlucky number.

https://twitter.com/DirRobSavage/status/1291874215851958278

https://twitter.com/DirRobSavage/status/1291872292834869248

Read More: Best Found Footage Horror Films

Hosts Movie Review: A Gore Filled Fun Horror Flick

Hosts is a 2020 horror movie that has a whole ton of gore, so if you are into that sort of thing, this will at least be a fun watch.

There is almost nothing I like more in a horror movie than gore. Sure, I like to be scared and on edge just as much as the next person, but throw in a bashed in head with an eye ball in it and you got me right where you want me. Hosts has no shortage of gore and blood splatter, which is probably why I enjoyed it. I am not too sure what that says about me but MEH, I am not too concerned about that either.

After reading the description of the story, I knew that a young couple would be invited to their neighbors house for a Christmas Eve dinner. I also knew that this couple would be possessed by demons. Not going to lie, this shocked me that the synopsis revealed that, as I expected it to be a twist that comes at least halfway through the movie.

Nope, it is almost immediately shown in the film. And it doesn’t take long for the Christmas Eve dinner to turn into a blood fest. There are a few twists and turns, and honestly, the plot was a bit all over the place. When the father confesses a fairly big lie to some other family members, I didn’t really care. I suppose that is because I already knew what was happening to them had nothing to do with that lie. Seemed like a moot point and unimportant addition to the plot.

It may not be the strongest story line, and there are certainly some issues, but Hosts is a lot of fun for horror fans. It clocks in at just under an hour and thirty minutes which seems perfect. There wasn’t enough time to get bored, and more than enough time for jump scares, bloody gore, and a little bit of drama.

About Hosts

On Christmas Eve, an innocent couple become hosts to a malicious entity. Throughout the night they terrorize a family of five in unimaginably violent and disturbing ways. These demonic possessions mark the beginning of a worldwide supernatural takeover, and the family of five who fall victim to the first attack are the unfortunate ones to experience the start of this horrific epidemic; A dark and bloody insight on how lying to your loved ones can not only alienate them, but it can completely destroy the bonds you have with them forever.

Watch Hosts on Amazon now!

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Movie Review | 'The Perfect Host'

A Welcome to His World Is Accepted at Your Peril

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By Stephen Holden

June 30, 2011

Warwick Wilson, the prim, dapper title character of “The Perfect Host,” played by David Hyde Pierce, seems at first to be a clone of Waldo Lydecker, the snobbish newspaper columnist of Otto Preminger’s film-noir classic “Laura.” As Warwick jousts with John Taylor (Clayne Crawford), a scruffy bank robber on the lam who talks his way into Warwick’s immaculate Los Angeles lair, you expect an insidious tug of war between an aesthete and a roughneck, similar to the power struggle of Clifton Webb’s imperious dandy and Dana Andrews’s earthy detective in “Laura.”

But what happens in this increasingly chaotic, comic psychological thriller — directed by Nick Tomnay from a screenplay he wrote with Krishna Jones — is a lot more complicated and confusing.

Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce’s best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.

From a persnickety, epicene bachelor, Warwick evolves into a madman running wild in his own home, and from there into a diabolical sociopath. You might describe the character as seriously, unpersuasively multiphrenic. Not even an actor as gifted as Mr. Pierce, who mines his unlimited repertory of grimaces, both comic and ominous, can connect these personalities; no actor could.

The robber, who claims to have been mugged and to have lost his luggage at the airport, is desperately fleeing the law after a $300,000 bank heist. Searching for a hideout, he smoothly talks his way into Warwick’s home using information from a postcard in the mailbox. His reluctant host, who is expecting dinner guests imminently, is putting the finishing touches on a yummy-looking feast of roast duck and vegetables. Shortly after Taylor has ingratiated himself, a news bulletin about the robbery alerts Warwick to his identity, at which point Taylor turns nasty, holds a chef’s knife to Warwick’s throat and threatens to kill him.

From here on, “The Perfect Host” steadily loses its grip. After chug-a-lugging too much of Warwick’s fine wine, Taylor loses his advantage, and the tables are turned. There follows a manic set piece as Warwick entertains his guests, who may or may not be imaginary. At one point the movie hints that even the writer of the postcard might have been nonexistent and that Warwick could have mailed it to himself.

As the dinner proceeds, and Taylor observes it in a half-drugged stupor while bound to a chair, some scenes show a houseful of guests dining and dancing. They even form a conga line, and Warwick leaps onto a table at one point and gyrates to “Car Wash.” But in other scenes Warwick is babbling and serving drinks to people who are not there.

“The Perfect Host” doesn’t bother to reconcile its contradictions. Instead it tacks on a clumsy third act that focuses on the details of the robbery and the back story involving Taylor’s relationship with a double-dealing bank teller. The finale is so disconnected to what has preceded it that it might as well be an outtake from another film.

“The Perfect Host” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some strong language and violence.

THE PERFECT HOST

Opens on Friday in New York, Los Angeles and Lansdowne, Pa.

Directed and edited by Nick Tomnay; written by Mr. Tomnay and Krishna Jones; director of photography, John Brawley; music by John Swihart; production design by Ricardo Jattan; produced by Stacey Testro and Mark Victor; released by Magnolia Pictures. In Manhattan at the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.

WITH: David Hyde Pierce (Warwick Wilson), Clayne Crawford (John Taylor), Nathaniel Parker (Detective Morton), Megahn Perry (Simone De Marchi) and Helen Reddy (Cathy Knight).

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‘the substance’ review: an excellent demi moore helps sustain coralie fargeat’s stylish but redundant body horror.

In her second feature, co-starring Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid, the French filmmaker examines society's ghoulish obsession with youth and beauty.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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‘The Substance’ Review: Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in a Visionary Feminist Body-Horror Film That Takes Cosmetic Enhancement to Extremes

Coralie Fargeat works with the flair of a grindhouse Kubrick in a weirdly fun, cathartically grotesque fusion of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and "Showgirls."

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“The Substance” tells the story of an aging Hollywood actress-turned-aerobics-workout-host, named Elisabeth Sparkle and played by Demi Moore , who gets fired from a TV network because she is now deemed too old. In a rage of desperation, she calls a number that’s been handed to her anonymously and gets hooked up with a sinister sci-fi body-enhancement program known as The Substance. She is given a heap of medical equipment sealed into plastic bags (syringes, tubing, a phosphorescent green liquid, a gooey white injectable food product), and she’s told about the protocol regarding her new self — which, the program warns, will also be her old self. “The two of you are one,” say the instructions. What does that mean?

Popular on Variety

Fargeat, who has made one previous feature (2017’s “Revenge”), works in a wide-angle-lens, up-from-exploitation style that might be described as cartoon grindhouse Kubrick. It’s like “A Clockwork Orange” fused with the kinetic aesthetics of a state-of-the-art television commercial. Fargeat favors super-close-ups (of body parts, cars, eating, kissing), with sounds to match, and she also vacuums up influences the way Brian De Palma once did (though he, in this case, is one of them). We’ve all seen dozens of retreads of the Jekyll-and-Hyde story, but Fargeat, in her imaginative audacity, fuses it with “Showgirls,” and even that isn’t enough for her. She draws heavily on the hallucinatory moment in “The Shining” where Jack Torrance embraces a young woman in a bathtub, only to see her transformed into a cackling old crone. Beyond that, Fargeat‘s images recall the exploding-beast-with-a-writhing-face in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” the bloodbath prom of “Carrie,” and the addiction-turned-dread of “Requiem for a Dream.”

What makes all of this original is that Coralie Fargeat fuses it with her own stylized aggro voice (she favors minimal dialogue, which pops like something out of a graphic novel), and with her feminist outrage over the way that women have been ruled by the world of images. At first, though, the over-the-top-ness does take a bit of getting used. Dennis Quaid plays the brash pig of a network executive, in baroquely decorated suit jackets, who has decided to fire Elisabeth, and when he’s having lunch with her, shoving shrimp in his mouth from what feels like four inches away from the audience, you want to recoil as much as she does. But Fageat is actually great with her actors; she knows that Quaid’s charisma, even when he’s playing a showbiz vulgarian as reprehensible as this, will make him highly watchable.

And Demi Moore’s performance is nothing short of fearless. She’s playing, in some very abstract way, a version of herself (once a star at the center of the universe, now old enough to be seen by sexist Hollywood as past it), and her acting is rippled with anger, terror, despair, and vengeance. There’s a lot of full-on nudity in “The Substance,” to the point that the film flirts with building a male gaze into the foundation of its aesthetic. Yet it does so only to pull the rug of voyeurism out from under us. Margaret Qualley makes Sue crisply magnetic in her confidence, and the fact that Sue knows how to package herself as an “object” is part of the film’s satirical design. She’s following the rules, “giving the people what they want.” It’s clear, I think, that Qualley is going to be a major star, and you see why here. She takes this stylized role and imbues it with a hint of mystery. For “The Substance” is finally a story of dueling egos, with Elisabeth’s real self and her enhanced self going at each other in a war for dominance.

“The Substance” does indeed play off “Showgirls” and the whole history of Hollywood cat-fight melodramas. The movie, in its visceral way, is deliriously ambitious (and, at 140 minutes, easily 20 minutes too long). But as it moves into the final chapter, its relatively restrained interface with body horror erupts into something cathartic in its extremity. Sue, at this point, has taken most of the life from Elisabeth, which means that Elisabeth has turned into a body so decrepit she makes the bathtub hag in “The Shining” look like Grace Kelly. But Fargeat is just getting started. The climactic sequence is set during the taping of the network’s New Year’s Eve special, which Sue has been chosen to host, and what happens there must be seen to be believed. Even if you watch horror movies all year long, this is still one of the rare ones to come up with a true monster , not just a mass of warped flesh but a deformation of the spirit. This, the film says, is what we’re repressing. It’s what we’re doing to ourselves.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (In Competition), May 19, 2024. Running time: 140 MIN.

Production: A Mubi release of a Working Title Films, A Good Title production. Producers: Coralie Fargeat, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner. Executive producers: Alexandra Loewy, Nicolas Royer.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Coralie Fargeat. Camera: Benjamin Kracun. Editor: Jérôme Eltabet. Music: 000 Raffertie.
With: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia, Phillip Schurer, Joseph Balderrama, Oscar Lesage, Gore Abrams, Magtthew Géczy.

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A group of college students host a midnight grindhouse film festival. They discover a cursed arthouse horror called "The Creeping Chaos". In classic horror fashion, they mistakenly screen th... Read all A group of college students host a midnight grindhouse film festival. They discover a cursed arthouse horror called "The Creeping Chaos". In classic horror fashion, they mistakenly screen the film and unleash absolute mayhem. A group of college students host a midnight grindhouse film festival. They discover a cursed arthouse horror called "The Creeping Chaos". In classic horror fashion, they mistakenly screen the film and unleash absolute mayhem.