Not to be confused with 2020 horror flick Host or 2013 Stephenie Meyer film The Host, 2006’s The Host is a Korean creature feature about a giant fishlike monster that lives in the Han River. They should have called it A Quiet Plaice.

Following in the wake of Jaws and Godzilla, Bong Joon Ho’s The Host has more satirical tentacles than your average monster movie. It opens with an American scientist dumping chemicals into the river, which spawns the slippery sewer mutant. We then meet the bumbling yet plucky Park family, who run a convenience store – not unlike the family in Parasite, with Song Kang-ho playing the father in both. His teenage daughter (Go Ah-sung) is snatched up by the rampaging creature and taken into Seoul’s sewers, leading the Parks on a mammoth fishing expedition.

In the spirit of George A. Romero, Bong Joon Ho deploys the monster attack movie to explore his usual themes of social inequality, Korean society and monsters of all varieties, using the family to probe the impact of American intervention on the working classes. While the US military presence and their use of a chemical weapon called ‘Agent Yellow’ evokes the region’s past, scenes of masked scientists and quarantined citizens foreshadow its pandemic-struck future.

But the film is also freaky good fun, thanks to its colourful characters and weird sense of humour. Although the plot meanders through their repeated capture and recapture, keeping the focus on the family and showing the action from their perspective keeps us invested in the human drama, a bit like M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. We see the creature through the daughter’s eyes as it vomits up human skeletons, and witness first-hand the dad’s terror when the incompetent authority figures insist that his grief-induced madness must be the result of a virus and conduct unnecessary medical procedures on him, punishing him for his humanity.

The Host falls down when it shows the creature itself, rendered in smooth, weightless CGI that never looks part of the real environment. This would be manageable in small doses, but the film overuses the mutant and even appears to repeat the same CGI shots, dampening the impact of its amphibiantics.

But with its bittersweet drama, biting commentary, inky colour palette and lively orchestral score, The Host emerges as a surprisingly Seoulful killer-fish flick.