The Host

Okay, so it came out a few years ago, but for the time being that is going to be the trend with this blog. I started it a few days ago and films have been around for 114 years, so I have a bit of a backlog to navigate.
The Host is a Korean film, set around the Han river in Seoul. It opens with a scene fresh out of the hackneyed school of creature features - dumping dangerous chemicals into the sewers. Immediately afterwards we meet the Park family. Patriarch, two sons, a daughter and a grand-daughter. Hee-Bong runs a small snack kiosk on the banks of the Han with his eldest son Kang Du, who's wife deserted him and their daughter soon after childbirth. Kang Du is trying to raise his daughter (Hyun Seo), who is now in her early teens, as best he can. Hee Bong loves Kang Du and understands his weaknesses and so is constantly reminding his other son and daughter to go easy on him, even as incredible events unfold around them.
All of this back-story and context unfolds with breath-taking leanness and efficiency. No clumsy exposition, no unnecessary flab or sentimentality, just what we need to go and then off we go. Off we go. Suddenly a mutant fish/amphibian/creature/thing appears out of the river and attacks. Everyone panics, everyone scatters, many get eaten. Despite what can only be presumed to be a rock-bottom budget, a genuinely unique creature has been crafted. We've got no idea what it is, but we're pretty sure it means to do harm and we want to be out of its way. It would not be over-stating the position to say that the attack scene goes toe to toe with the opening attack of Spielberg's War of the Worlds for impact. It's that effective, that terrifying.
In the melee, Kang Du accidentally lets go of his daughter's hand and she is taken by the creature. The rest of the film therefore consists, after Kang Du receives a desperate call from his daughter on her mobile, of the rest of the family joining forces to find the creature's lair and rescue Hyun Seo. They have no tracking skills, no plot-device convenient background in the marines. Hee Bong's daughter has archery skills that inevitably come to the fore in the climactic show-down, but the rest of the family are refreshingly, almost disconcertingly inept. Heck, Kang Du cannot even keep count of how many bullets are in his shotgun and his brother fails to throw a Molotov cocktail properly for no other reason than because sometime normal people mess up straight forward tasks.
The film has effective, well-aimed digs at government bureaucracy, cover-ups and incompetence and the inability of ordinary people to get the attention of those supposedly in charge. The family rally together but they still bicker, still get cross with each other, still end the film with the same emotional problems and character flaws they had at the beginning. The pacing and narrative drive lag noticeably in the middle when the film seems to lose a sense of where it is supposed to be going. Then all of a sudden it snaps out of it and hurtles towards a petrol bomb/agent yellow / flaming arrow / mutant newt conclusion that manages to be crowd-pleasing and stirring without being predictable or cloying.
As with all well made foreign films it will no doubt be ruined in the obvious Hollywood remake. See it first then you can tell everyone how much better the original is.