Host (2020)

Rob Savage's Host arrives with a premise so of its moment that it risks expiring alongside it: six friends, a Zoom call, a London lockdown, and a medium hired to conduct a séance that nobody respects. The film runs fifty-six minutes and wastes none of them. It is a screenlife contraption, shot remotely during the pandemic with the actors operating their own cameras and lighting, and the resourcefulness shows without ever announcing itself. The result is a haunted house distributed across six separate homes, with the demon traveling by broadband. The scares are genuine, and they are achieved with fishing wire and a filter setting.

The cast is largely female, and one member was born in Bulgaria, though the film treats neither fact as a statement. These are simply the friends who happen to be on the call, and the screenplay never pauses to remark on their demographics. The women anchor the horror as victims, not symbols. No argument gets made about gender, power, or anything else. The demon is a demon. It has no interest in the social order, and the movie shares that indifference.

What Host lacks in thematic ambition it compensates for with discipline. There is no sermon here, no moment where the characters stop screaming to explain what the ordeal says about late capitalism or the warming planet. Race goes unmentioned. Sexuality goes unmentioned. The body is a thing to be broken by an invisible assailant, not a site of affirmation. The film wants only to frighten you, and it succeeds at a rate most of its more self-important contemporaries cannot match. It is lean, nasty, and efficient, and its refusal to lecture is the most old-fashioned thing about it. We are left with a modest artifact of a strange year, a movie that knows what it is and never pretends otherwise.