Director: Dong-il Shin
Length: 1 hr 32 mins
Rated: N/A

This exceptionally promising but flawed Korean film carefully crafts an ironic, delicate picture of an "odd couple" friendship, develops it, runs it aground on the plot, then finally and unforgivably scuttles the whole enterprise.

Ho-Jun (Jae-rok Kim) is a embittered and failing film lecturer, whose atrophied state is barely sustained with a diet of bile, nicotine, and Internet porn. His pathetic attempts to exercise and have some kind of normal conversation with women fail, and he finally ends up trapped is his bathroom, naked and freezing, in a kind of serendipitous suicide. An unlikely coincidence sees him saved by a young god-botherer, Gye-sang (Ji-Hwan Kang). Gratefully, warily, Ho-Jun begins to seek out his company.

Their unlikely friendship never quite becomes comfortable. In Korea, Gye-sang's faith makes him even more of an outsider than the misanthropic Ho-Jun, and it's refreshing to see a religious protagonist sympathetically treated - i.e. he doesn't turn out to be a pedophile. The wry humour sometimes comes from the tension between the odd couple, but more often its source is Ho-Jun's worst excesses, and Gye-sang's grudging attempts to protect the sozzled curmudgeon from himself. The story moves towards an ambivalent but uplifting denouement, where Ho-Jun is resuscitated by Gye-sang's care, and Gye-sang accepts that his stigma as an Christian cultist will be permanent. But then first-time writer/director Dong-il Shin loses his nerve.

Very suddenly sentenced to prison for conscientious objection (the journey from countryside to courtroom takes a frame), the young evangelical gives an preachy Great Dictator-style speech against the evils of war and conscription, in a scene so jarringly out-of-tenor it could be from a different (and inferior) film. It's as if a private piano recital has suddenly been interrupted by a Salvation Army marching band.  This bewildering twist (which may have greater resonance in South Korea) doesn't exhaust the good-will built up so meticulously in the first reels, and as the sublime becomes the ridiculous, we at least want to see where the ridiculous ends up. Unfortunately it ends up in the ludicrous. The sentence following contains a spoiler, which also spoils the film for anyone who watching it. Ho-Jun, now looking inexplicably pine-fresh, vows to bust his Bible-bashing buddy out of the can, then digs up a case of explosives buried by North Korean spies. The End. He might well use a flying car.

Still worth seeing for what it might have been (and very nearly is), Host & Guest excels until it reaches a point of  artificial crisis. As for the solution to the crisis, you might want to leave before then - you'll see a better movie.