A party is never just a party

Not every day one has the luck to witness Willem Dafoe uninhibitedly dancing Greek folklore. The Host, an adaptation by Miguel Ángel Jiménez of Panos Karnezis' biographical novel, offers the viewer not only the juicy opportunity to share intimacies and drinks with the iconic American actor, but also proposes a hypnotic island journey in which the cinematic device surrenders to both a liquid and feverish atmosphere and the irregularly hieratic performances that conceal the protagonist.

Straddling Lanthimos' magical sadism and Östlund's social satire, the narrative opts, self-consciously, for an erratic immersion in the dark waters of madness and lyricism, while displaying the shames of the absurdity of wealth and digging into the grief and ravages of a tempestuous parent-child relationship. The plot, thus, obeys the baton of violence, power, and abuse (which neither appearances nor elegance nor savoir faire can conceal) and culminates in a psychoanalytic and lysergic study (due to the emergence of traumas and substance use) but also a witch's sabbath (due to the savagery of the human condition, whatever its patrimony).

The pandemonium constitutes a formally sophisticated and grotesque Latin American melodrama of paroxysm: metaphorical and with a political undertone (when it flies over the ghosts of the Franco dictatorship); lucidly cruel with its excessive and contained characters, and adorned with a miraculous soundtrack and a nocturnal bewitching cinematography, thanks to the credit of Gris Jordana from Manlleu.