Warning: this review contains minor spoilers

Bong Joon-Ho has achieved preeminence in the world of Korean cinema with only three films. He has met not only with exceptional commercial success but also quasi-unanimous critical acclaim in the film festival circuit, notably during the presentation of The Host in Cannes.  I would like to give the sketch of an explanation for this with a few remarks about director Bong’s “exploitation of the unique and specific possibilities of the medium of cinema” (Panofsky).

In “On Movies”, a lecture he gave in 1936 (later published with the title: “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures”) art historian Erwin Panofsky defined several archetypes of viewing satisfaction that the first movie-goers seemed to share: “success or retribution, sentiment, sensation, pornography, and crude humor”. Aside from pornography, The Host cumulates all of the above and manages to incorporate and generate these quasi-primitive pleasures of cinema, by returning to a certain form of artlessness and naivety: from the almost scatological burlesque running through the film, to more typical (or typically Korean) family melodrama, not to mention scathing political comments, subtly sketched, but not entirely innocent of ambiguities, and at any rate, absolutely liberating. So one is tempted to ask the Matrix question: what is The Host exactly?