In this micro-budget indie-horror film, a very well-worn story gets a modern update. A group of friends gather to have a séance, only to accidentally awaken an evil presence etc. etc. bad ends for everyone etc. etc. But the update here isn’t only technological; it’s specifically the year 2020. The group of friends, due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, meet, not in person, but on a Zoom call for this séance. That’s a pretty good hook, made even better when you remember that it was released in July of 2020 when the Pandemic was at a peak (unfortunately not THE peak, which I remember hoping it was at the time), thanks to the insanely fast turn around of less than four months from original concept to the film’s streaming debut. With that kind of turn around, the film really could very easily have been unwatchable or, at best, a mere gimmick.
It’s actually pretty good. The film itself is a lean 59 minutes which helps a lot. On Blu-Ray, presumably to keep people like me from pretentiously intoning, “So it’s really more of a SHORT film then?”, the movie has been expanded to 67 minutes. Unfortunately, the structure of the film is paced to the free one-hour Zoom call, so the only way to do this is to insert footage of the cast & crew having an actual séance on Zoom into the credits and this is not interesting at all. Regardless, even with the short running time, I enjoyed some of the character work. In particular, the two main characters, Haley & Jemma, are very well written; of the friend group, they seem to be the two closest friends and, by virtue and in spite of this, they are also the best at getting under each others’ skins and pushing each others’ buttons. Haley Bishop and Jemma Moore give really excellent, naturalistic performances in the roles as well; Bishop absolutely nails the annoyance of asking your friends to take something seriously and then watching things go off the rails because they won’t and when it is Jemma’s flippancy that leads to the bad turn of events, Haley’s anger starts to build and Jemma becomes more and more defensive. I thought that they had real chemistry and their relationship felt real and weighted with emotional history. I’d also give praise to Emma Louise Webb; her character is one of the most underwritten of the main characters, but, particularly in those last ten minutes or so, she does some absolutely superlative scared acting, something that’s genuinely really hard to do. She reaches a level of genuinely pants-******** terror that was really great.
The film is predictable in a way that doesn’t keep the interest up, but the film has the ticking clock of Zoom alerting the characters, and the audience, that their call is about to be up and then slowly counting down the film’s final ten minutes. This leads to a genuinely startling climax that is predictable and a little silly, but it’s one of those moments that makes you jump even when you know it’s coming. And I liked the abruptness of it; despite the horrors that have been visited on these characters and the horrors they still face, modern day technology doesn’t care and when the time is up, the Zoom call dispassionately ends with no regard for the “requirements” of a proper “story-structure” or anything like that. Anyway, is Host a great movie? No, but it’s better than it had any right to be and it IS better than just a time-capsule or a gimmicky experiment. It’s not a must-see, but it’s worth a watch. 3 stars.
tl;dr – séance on Zoom movie is gimmicky & a relic of the early days of COVID-19, but good character work, excellent performances & a brisk pace make it better than it might have been. 3 stars.