| Thriller, Crime, Mystery |
Director: Andy Newbery
Writers: Finola Geraghty, Brendan Bishop, Laurence Lamers
Cast: Maryam Hassouni, Mike Beckingham, Dougie Poynter, Nigel Barber
Rating: R
Release Date (Theaters):Jan 17, 2020 Limited
Release Date (Streaming):Jan 17, 2020
Runtime: 1h 43m
Andy Newbery’s bizarro feature debut starts out a sort of Hitchcockian thriller before switching about halfway through into something entirely different.
The Host is the story of a London banker who seizes the opportunity to change his mundane life by taking a risk with his employer’s money. A series of events leads him to travel to Amsterdam, a city of dark secrets where all is not as it seems. Driven by power players, drugs, seduction, and violence, the film portrays a deadly game of choice and consequence.
We begin with Robert Atkinson (Mike Beckingham), a London banker who makes woeful decisions in apparently every facet of his life. We meet him being straddled by his boss’s hot wife (Margot Stilley), and things only get worse from there. He nabs fifty large from his workplace and then blows it playing poker at an upscale gambling den populated exclusively by Chinese gangland stereotypes. Confident in his hand, he takes a loan from his unsavory opponent and then loses that, finding himself at the mercy of the sinister Lau (Togo Igawa), who offers to pay his debt and then some just as long as he agrees to transport a briefcase to Amsterdam and return another one full of God-knows-what.
Atkinson, who looks and sounds like an older Tom Holland who had a tougher paper round, lacks the necessary charisma to make Robert sympathetic; he’s much more of a self-serving simpleton who makes more terrible choices in a ten-minute span of The Host than most characters do in their entire screentime.
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