Serafima Serafimova
I was genuinely gutted when my Uber customer rating dropped from 4.94 to 4.8 after an especially boozy ride home one night. Never mind that 4.8 is an excellent score. I wore that 4.94 like a tiny badge of honour, proof that I was a worthy human being. It was only my pride on the line. But what if your livelihood depended on those five little stars? For those people, hell isn’t fire and brimstone anymore. It’s wondering whether today’s customer is about to tank your average rating with a single click – and your career along with it.
Kai Hasson’s Five Star takes that very modern anxiety and spins it into a wildly entertaining horror-comedy. It begins with all the ingredients of a classic monster movie before taking its audience to some wonderfully unexpected places. By weaving the absurd pressures of the five-star economy into its supernatural thrills, Hasson transforms a familiar monster story into something fresher and surprisingly relatable. Anchored by a disarming performance from Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, whose lovably awkward locksmith is impossible not to root for (bad breath and all), Five Star is a horror-comedy that never settles for the obvious.
“What if the wardrobe from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was discovered by a blue-collar Asian immigrant?”
Soung Kang is a locksmith and the unfortunate owner of a deeply troubling 2.9-star customer rating. So when Maya, a woman who has just moved into a new house, calls him in the middle of the night about a troublesome closet door, he sees an opportunity to finally earn the five stars he desperately needs. But when Soung arrives, he discovers a problem unlike anything he has faced before: the door is not refusing to open, it refuses to stay shut. What begins as a very unusual repair job quickly turns into something darker, taking Soung much further than any locksmith reasonably should go in pursuit of that elusive five-star review.
Hasson’s starting point was simple: “What if the wardrobe from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was discovered by a blue-collar Asian immigrant?” The director told S/W, “From there, the story took us into an exploration of trying your absolute best to be a success, even though it can feel like the world is set up to make you fail,” he adds. But alongside that sat an even simpler ambition. “More than anything, I wanted to create a flick. Something fun that an audience would find scary and funny at the same time.”
Paul Sun-Hyung Lee stars as a locksmith on a quest for a five star Yelp review
Horror-comedy is a difficult balance to strike, but for me, Five Star gets it just right. The laughs never undercut the scares, and the scares never get in the way of the laughs. One of the funniest moments comes when Soung nervously waves at the demon as it’s nibbling on its latest victim, only for it to casually wave back. It’s such a tiny throwaway gag, but it had me in stitches. Moments later, Hasson is delivering genuinely effective jump scares without ever missing a beat or making it feel as though he’s switched genres.
But if Five Star has a secret weapon, it’s Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. Soung could easily have become a one-note joke of a character: the hapless locksmith who will go to increasingly absurd lengths to improve his customer rating. Instead, Lee makes him completely believable, very funny and thoroughly enjoyable to watch. Before long, Soung has become such an endearing underdog that you find yourself willing him to succeed. I’d happily watch an entire series following him as an unsuspecting locksmith by day and accidental demon slayer by night.
Maybe those star ratings shouldn’t matter quite as much as we’ve allowed them to. Five Star knows they do anyway. Equal parts monster movie, workplace comedy and sly satire of our rating-obsessed culture, it’s one of the most inventive horror-comedies I’ve seen in a long while. Five stars.