DW Medoff’s Your Host opens with Jake (Tom Claxton), his face bloody and his neck in a chain collar, seated before three large wrapped gift boxes, as the voice of an unseen master of ceremonies declares him the winner, but tells him that he must play one final round: choose one of the three boxes and win a prize. The box that Jake picks contains a shot gun. “You said I’d live,” Jake protests. “People say a lot of things,” replies the shadowy interlocutor, before triggering a Heath Robinson-esque improvised contraption that triggers the gun to blow Jake’s head off. Two things immediately become obvious from this prologue: that we are watching a sadistic Saw-like game unfold; and that the dice are loaded to ensure that the house always wins.
So when we see obnoxious trust fund kid James (Jamie Fletters) arriving at his father’s summerhouse with Anita (Elle-Rae Smith), Matthew (David Angland) and Melissa (Joelle Rae) on the occasion of Anita’s birthday, a sense of doom already hangs over this young group, and not just because of the obvious tensions between them. Sure enough, after they hear a noise at the door that night and find an old camcorder left recording outside on a tripod, they will all be drugged and wake up chained to the wall of a concrete-rendered hellhole that has been made to look like a DIY television studio (with grotesque mannequins for its audience). Now they are unwilling guests on a deranged game show, whose half-masked host Barry Miller (Jackie Earle Haley) sets them tasks that involve intimate confessions, impossible dilemmas, and penalties that are painful, permanently crippling, even lethal.
It may be clear from the start where things are headed for these four people whose names Barry already knows – but less clear is who exactly this would-be entertainer is, and why he has this particular quartet on his guest list for lessons in moral choices and their very real consequences. He is an unusual villain, played with understatement by Haley to bring a sadness and even a sympathetic quality to his sadism, as though he is as trapped and as much of victim as those he imprisons in his gamified dungeon. At the same time, Barry is no less committed than director Medoff (I Will Never Leave You Alone, 2023) to turning all this depravity into a deranged spectacle – and once we see, in flashbacks, Barry’s former connection, now forever lost, to the world of television entertainment, it becomes apparent that his vindictiveness and his madness are rooted in a ruinous injustice. Barry may serially do wrong, but his cause is righteous.
Make no mistake: with all its manipulated torments and high-stakes double binds, Your Host really is derivative of James Wan’s Saw (2004). Yet where the puppet master in Wan’s film “never killed anyone, he finds ways for them to kill themselves”, Barry is not afraid to get his hands a little dirty and to do a bit of his own murdering, even if he punishes himself for such transgressions. Meanwhile Joey Miller’s screenplay innovates both with a focus on cameras, recording and glittery showmanship that is positively metacinematic, and with a backstory that is deeply incendiary (precisely for not being black and white) in the age of #MeToo. For here the rich and powerful always seem to get away with real crimes even as others are destroyed for being falsely accused, and people and careers prove as readily cancellable as stale TV programmes. Game shows are, after all, never far from the nightly news.
Your Host had its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Friday 22 August
