At the beginning of the Korean monster flick + dysfunctional family comedy Gwoemul (The Host), a desi bystander witnesses a beast in the Han River. ‘Aap Pakistan se hai? … Woh samudra se aya. (Are you from Pakistan? It came from the sea.)’ Then the flick shatters monster movie convention with a flourish, showing the mutant in broad daylight in its dappled green entirety. And what a graceful beast it is: part dinosaur, part bat, part champion diver, and entirely real. Kudos to the effects team.

The real villains in The Host are blind bureaucracy, American soldiers and greedy fellow Seoul residents. The movie feels more like Brazil than Godzilla in the end, but the real pathos lies in the squabbling family with a comic antihero father whose daughter is abducted by the beast. Showing this movie all over America would be the quickest way to dispel the model minority myth

Director Bong Joon-Ho’s politics seem leftist. The movie refers to Agent Orange and intertwines the lives of the family and the beast, both hunted by a blind state apparatus despite their right of harvest, the right to eat. It throws in topical references to bird flu, SARS and Iraq; the government hunts a non-existent virus of mass destruction while ignoring the monster in the flesh. The American military, still stationed on the Korean Peninsula, comes off as so aggressively ignorant that Kimg Jong-il’s regime actually lauded the film.

The central premise of the film is based on a real-life incident:

In February 2000 at a US military facility located in the center of Seoul, U.S. military civilian employee Mr. McFarland ordered to dispose formaldehyde into the sewer system leading to the Han River, despite the objection of a Korean subordinate. The Korean government attempted to prosecute Mr. McFarland in [a] Korean court, but [the] U.S. military refused to hand over the custody of Mr. McFarland to the Korean legal system. [Link]

In one scene, the family attends at a public memorial for victims of the beast. The close-knit family’s slapstick, over-the-top grieving is very Bolly. Like Bollywood, the film is a bit pat, with all loose ends tied up and rare skills (archery — really?) coming in handy in the final reel. Korean families have much in common with desis. This sounds mighty familiar:

Anyone who has taken the plunge into recent Korean movies… will know that their impact springs not just from the verve of the storytelling but from a tendency to hurtle energetically from one mood to the next, merrily swapping the lyrical for the sadistic. It is as if Korean directors, refusing to observe the niceties of genre, offered value for money by packing several movies into one. [Link]

Yet the film is so much more tightly written than Bollywood, it’s humbling. More than anything this film reminded me of the wasted potential of the mainstream Hindi film industry, where writers are treated as peons and sometimes invited to their own premieres as an afterthought.

Gwoemul is being remade for America, and like Infernal Affairs the new version will likely suffer against the original. If you haven’t seen it yet, definitely do. It’s the best movie I’ve seen in quite a while.

Check out the trailer:

A. Lane has more.

Apropos of nothing, here’s Stephen Colbert doing a screamingly funny take on a Korean music vid (via Indiano Guy):

Here’s part 3 of Mad TV’s takeoff on Korean serials: