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Host Movie Review

Host is a 2020 found footage horror film directed by Rob Savage and starring Haley Bishop among others. It’s a surprisingly strong found footage flick that is so much fun to watch.

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“It’ll be fine. The woman is a friend of mine.

So she’s done it a bunch of times for me“

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This is the first ever movie that was not only shot during the pandemic, but it also references it. There is a mask here, the girls are having a video chat on Zoom and the movie touches upon lockdown effects on people and how video chatting is both personal and distant at the same time. They emphasized so well on the fear that you might feel upon not being able to help your friend on the screen.

So basically what we have here is a movie that is very short, but sweet. It is only fifty minutes long and it follows an entire Zoom conversation that only lasts for about forty minutes, so it is executed in real time, and everything about it worked for me. Guilty pleasure or not, Host is hugely entertaining and it flies by how genuinely riveting and scary it is.

And it is really creepy. My favorite moments are the mask scene, which was very smartly at first confused with an online filter, the footprints in flour are creepy and the entire second half is genuinely disturbing throughout, especially as it becomes more brutal. The film holds no punches in its ending, which I really did not expect.

The characterization is beyond slight. I liked them as a group and I found the acting actually to be very good because the director Rob Savage managed to wring genuine reactions from the actresses as he surprised them for real with some effects during filming. But individually, they are far from great and are forgettable.

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The problem persists also that Host is never as meticulously detailed as it could and should have been. More scares and supernatural phenomena should have been put on each of the girls’ screens, but overall those scares that we got were excellent and they all worked for me. Also, expecting constantly on your edge what would happen next was genuinely intense and so much fun while the shaky cam here is better than in most other horror flicks.

Guilty pleasure or not, Host is a hugely entertaining horror flick that needed more scary details on each of the screens and better characterization, but it mostly worked as this short and sweet exercise in found footage filmmaking that makes great use of its Zoom screens and is very relevant in its lockdown premise. The second half is intense as it is unexpectedly dark and genuinely creepy in many superbly executed scares.

My Rating – 4