The Host

Robert (Mike Beckingham) is having an affair - the sort that involves frantic lunch hour sex in hotel rooms and being sworn to secrecy - but it seems to have no future because he has no money. So one day he embezzles a large sum of cash from work and goes off and gets himself in a whole heap of trouble which his loyal brother Steve (Dougie Poynter) ultimately has to try to resolve.

If you're paying attention, you may recognise the plot of Psycho, one of several much better films mashed together to create this pretty but convoluted and really quite silly thriller. A far cry from Janet Leigh's complex, morally uncomfortable opportunist thief, Robert is so shallow that one fears he could evaporate completely on a hot day, and such an easy mark that he really shouldn't be allowed out of doors on his own. It's not really Beckingham's fault; he doesn't get much support from the scriptwriters, who invest themselves early on in the notion that a happy ending and testifying against the Triads can conceivably both be parts of the same film. Whatever research has gone into the story seems to have come entirely from other films rather than the real world. Very little actually works the way the writers think it does, which will at least keep you guessing as to what will happen next, but not for the right reasons.

Persuaded to go to Amsterdam to swap one suitcase for another, and shocked when he realises belatedly that there might be drugs involved, our hapless hero gets in a spot of bother with his accommodation and ends up being offered a room by studiously mysterious local aristocrat Vera (Maryam Hassouni), whose wardrobe must have accounted for a sizeable portion of the film's budget yet still covers so little of her that one can see that her offer of a drink entails risk. Robert, however, loves to gamble even when he has nothing to fall back on. the question hanging over the film is not whether or not he can avoid reaching crisis point but how often he will do it and whether he feasibly can maintain his habit of making each move stupider than the one that went before.

Each writer seems to have come to this film with their own pet plot strands and characters. The quantity of events taking place far exceeds their ability to develop any of these properly within the narrative space that remains to them. Oona Menges' cinematography is luminous, director Andy Newbery makes an adequate job of the framing (clearly enjoying getting to make something for the big screen after years working in television), and the settings are fantastic, but the plot is so full of holes that it can only be described as distressed.

Ultimately, The Host offers the viewer something similar to what Robert's married lover seems to have got out of their affair. It's nice to look at if you like that sort of thing, and you may find it amusing for a couple of hours, but you can't even begin to take it seriously.