Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Brandon Christensen
Starring: Gracie Gillam, Osric Chau, Sara Canning, Barbara
Crampton
Director Brandon Christensen's first two movies -
Still/Born
and
Z
- were old school thrillers that could well have been made in the 1970s or
'90s. His latest feature, Superhost, is very much of its time however. If you tried to explain the concepts of
vlogging and Air BnB to someone in 1975 or even '95 they'd probably look at
you like you had two heads.
Superhost revolves around exactly those two modern
quirks. Teddy (Osric Chau) and Claire (Sara Canning) are
a couple of romantically involved travel vloggers. Well, truth be told,
Teddy is significantly more romantically involved than Claire. He's secretly
planning to propose marriage while they're staying at an idyllic home in the
woods, which they plan to review for the next episode of their YouTube show.
Claire seems more in love with their channel, and she's obsessing over their
dwindling subscription numbers.
At said home in the woods they meet their host, Rebecca (Gracie Gillam), who is chirpy to a psychotic degree and has a mad look in her piercing
blue eyes. She seems harmless enough, but when Teddy and Claire discover
that she's monitoring them with CCTV cameras they don't decide to
immediately pack up and leave. Rather they agree (reluctantly on Teddy's
part) to make Rebecca the subject of their episode, hoping her insanity will
draw in new viewers.
Superhost is essentially a horror-comedy, but in this case
the comedy gets in the way of the horror. Had this been played straight it
might have served as an astute examination of how vloggers, and indeed their
more respected cousins - documentarians- can exploit members of the public.
Rebecca is clearly mentally ill, and at first she just seems like a lonely,
socially awkward person with no filter. The film never really critiques
Teddy and Claire as much as it really should though. Once the scale of
Rebecca's psychosis is revealed it's impossible to sympathise with her, but
I still found Claire the more relatably reprehensible of the characters
here, as she clearly has no qualms exploiting someone else's mental issues
for the sake of likes and subscriptions.
Horror stalwart Barbara Crampton pops up as a host whose business
was ruined by a negative video review on Teddy and Claire's channel. The
film never reveals the details of this however, so we're unsure if
Crampton's host deserved the bad review or if Teddy and Claire went
overboard for clicks (Claire constantly refers to it as being their most
popular episode). Oddly, the film seems more critical of the homeshare
hosting community than of influencers.
The performances of the quartet keep us engaged, with Gillam going all out
in crazy bitch mode and Chau likeable as the "final boy." But fans of
Christensen's previous tight thrillers will be disappointed at how
unfocussed the storytelling is here by comparison, and by the climax it all
feels like a generic slasher that missed an opportunity for some satirical
commentary on the lengths people are forced to go to make a buck in the gig
economy.
Superhost is on Shudder now.
