Host (2020)
Directed by Rob Savage; screenplay by Rob Savage, Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd; starring Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Web, Radina Drandova and Caroline Ward (I had to list all of the main characters, they literally share the screen the whole time.)
3.5/5
In an answer to the in all likelihood never asked question of “how might we make this séance a little bit more chilling?” director Rob Savage and co-writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd step things up a notch by isolating all their participants in their own homes and forcing them to look helplessly on from behind their cameras as, one by one, they’re each visited by a malevolent spirit.
It’s a COVID-19 production through and through, and though it’s quite clearly been hindered in its making by the pandemic – beyond the obvious aspect of the characters being separate, restrictions forced the actors to double as the film’s crew in almost all senses – in a rather common tale in filmmaking history, the bounds the current global situation put on the film forced its creators to explore, entirely successfully in my mind, new creative territory.
It’s an incredibly simple premise. A group of six friends sit down with a medium via Zoom call and attempt to contact the spirit world for what is intended to be a bit of fun one evening. Well, actually, that’s probably what is most debatable – at least to the group it is.
Haley (Haley Bishop), the one who organised the event and who has participated in séances before, albeit in person, is a firm believer. She strongly urges her friends, who are so incredibly believable as twenty-something Brits just trying to stay in touch with their uni friends here, to take things seriously. It’s hard to say whether she’s more concerned about their inadvertently conjuring some malicious spirit or simply offending the well-intentioned psychic. Her pleas fall on deaf ears, however, when half of the group immediately start taking shots at every instance of the words “astral plane” being uttered.
Not a lot happens at first, and this leads to another rather more skeptical participant, Jemma (Jemma Moore), playing a particularly mean-spirited prank on the rest of the call and after the medium crashes out of the call before Jemma can come clean, the night takes a turn from slightly on edge, to jump out of your seat spooky – or, at least, the being dragged across the room, bum firmly in seat kind.
Immediately noticeable is the film’s runtime. It’s an hour long and it takes place entirely in real-time. Personally, that felt like a key part of why it was so easy to buy in, but there is more to this feeling, I sense. Found-footage horror, particularly that recently developed sub-sub-genre of desktop-horror (popularised by the middling cyber-bullying fable, Unfriended, and improved upon by the missing-child thriller, Searching), is a really tough one to get people on board with.
Often, when you’re asking the audience to take everything as actual footage of actual events, you have to be pretty on point with literally every element or people will fixate on the lack of plausibility. One common issue is the reasoning behind the camera being carried about the whole film, even with the apocalypse going on outside. Another is the recognisability of the actors, that being weighed against the risk of unknown talent also breaking the immersion with slightly wobbly delivery.
But Host suffers none of these flaws. It feels like you’re part of the call – well, except for the part where you have to close the little window relaying your own camera feed back to you for sheer self-consciousness.
The broad cast of actors is varied only inasmuch as their characters actually feel like individuals, to my mind there are no cracks in any of their performances. Seriously, all involved are stellar here. The awkward chatter early on in the film that can so often just feel like a slog to sit through before things start to go bump, in actuality perfectly lays the groundwork for later breakdowns in communication and relationships and is executed with such ease that it just utterly convinces you of these girls’ existences.
And the visual effects, oh the visual effects. Produced in camera by the actors themselves after being taught through virtual workshops and helped along somewhat by the dodgy Zoom call quality we all know and loath, they’re all just so… tangible.
On the other side of things, the digital one, there is an utterly inspired use of the native Zoom call features. In a particularly slick instance, Caroline, perhaps the hardest-done-by of all the participants, shows off her custom background which is just a looping video of her entering the room and moving about doing some chores. It’s obvious it’ll come back and be put into some terrifying use later on as soon as it’s shown, but with everything going on you’ll forget about it until it’s just a little bit too late.
The only area I could have really asked for more from Host was in its development of certain relationships and themes. Interestingly this is where its worse-in-all-ways-but-one predecessor, Unfriended, probably one-ups it a little.
It’s an hour-long film, so you know what you are and you aren’t putting yourself in for here, but certain elements, such as the tensions between the singular believer and the rest of the group felt as though they were abandoned almost immediately after they served their specifically plot-driven purposes. It’s a bit of shame, but only inasmuch as some of those squabbles and fallings out are actually some of the hardest bits to watch unfold specifically for their incisive ability to induce cringe.
Put simply, it’s a really effective little slice of British horror and I’d recommend it to anyone with an hour to spare.