Making a film intrinsically about COVID-19, while COVID-19 is still a thing and still a danger to public health, isn’t an inherently bad idea. All art is reflective of the era in which it was made, and film is no exception; knowing how much the pandemic has fucked up the industry in regards to getting work done and released, working around the conditions involved shouldn’t automatically be seen as a bad thing. I’m not saying that exploiting the situation for profit isn’t shady as all fuck; just that not every production in this space should be seen as such. At least, not until it proves itself to be in that vein.
After what happened with Locked Down, I went into this other
film set during COVID lockdown (in a roundabout way, which I’ll get to) with
far lower expectations. Other than hearing a fair bit of negative press about
it since it first released in the U.S. in December, I’ve resigned myself to the
notion that Host was going to be a rare example of a film made in extraordinary
circumstances that was itself an extraordinary work of art. I’ve been seeing
the word “tasteless” floating around a lot in discussions about Songbird, hence
my little spiel about the supposed ethics problems with making a film about a
pandemic while said pandemic is still happening, so I was ready for the worst
of it. And while that's unfortunately what I got, it wasn't in the form I was expecting.
