To Note WE WERE GIVEN A STREAMING LINK NOT BLU RAY COPY

HOST has become an overnight sensation in the last few months. A film recorded during the pandemic and on the platform most of us have conducted our business and home life. We all know the screens, the sounds and the problems with connectivity. As they say, familiarity breeds contempt and contempt breeds good cinema. Which I suspect is half the reason that the place we most live in, is also the place we most want to run from. As the creeping horrors of a monster living in our midst attests to, Home is not the sort of place you can escape from.

5 Friends meet to conduct a séance online. None of theme believe. Its all for shits and giggles. Home bound has left them in dire straights for thrills and so the chance to escape for an hour is thrilling. However technical difficulties begin to add up and then there is those noises off screen. They leave everyone spooked. Everyone nervous. Then the flashes of odd things on screen bring home that something nasty this way comes.

HOST is not the killer Zoom movie it wishes to be. Zoom as a prop for a horror venture makes sense. Its a part of our lives. Connecting to our Pandemic day to day also.  But the film uses Zoom poorly. Yes it is as a prop for its relationship to our living state at the moment but it restricts and dictates the films flow. This causes all manner of issues with the way the film performances, narration and attention is diverted. The shocks become jarring, the fear jitters and stalls. All in all I was not very taken with the horror but the performances were all round exemplary. If they had better content to work with, a better director to direct and a better narrative pivot to rotate on, the film could have been much more.