Movie Review: Parasite

Parasite ***** / *****

Directed by: Joon-ho Bong.

Written by: Joon-ho Bong and Jin Won Han.

Starring: Kang-ho Song (Kim Ki-taek), Yeo-jeong Jo (Park Yeon-kyo), So-dam Park (Kim Ki-jung), Woo-sik Choi (Kim Ki-woo), Sun-kyun Lee (Park Dong-ik), Ji-so Jung (Park Da-hye), Hye-jin Jang (Kim Chung-sook), Jeong-eun Lee (Moon-gwang), Seo-joon Park (Min), Hyun-jun Jung (Park Da-song), Myeong-hoon Park (Geun-se).

 

Note: I am very glad I listened to all the critics who advised going into Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite cold – or at least as cold as possible – so I avoided all reviews or discussions on the film since its debut at Cannes back in May. That’s good advice for most films – but particularly here. So see Parasite ASAP – it is every bit as good as you’ve heard – but don’t read anything about it before hand. You’ve been warned.

 

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is the Korean auteur’s best film to date – and the best distillation of what he’s basically been doing ever since his international breakthrough The Host – which is essentially to make a film that you start out thinking is escapist, genre fun and then eventually lowering the boom on the audience and revealing the tragedy at its core. Parasite is perhaps his most despairing film to date – the one that offers the least amount of hope for the future of its characters, or hell, humanity in general. In the world of Parasite there is the rich, and then there’s the rest of us – and no matter what we do, we’re screwed. Eventually, the only logical thing to do is to give up – stop making plans, because they don’t work out anyway. The best you can hope for is to survive.

 

Parasite begins as a very entertaining, dark comedy of sorts. It focuses on the Kim family – father Ki-taek (Bong regular Kang-ho Song giving his best performance for the auteur here) and mother Chung-sook (Hye-jin Jang) and unemployed, and basically have nothing except they’re crummy basement apartment – whose window looks out at an alley that bums use to piss in. Their two children are extremely intelligent and talented – but there’s no money to further their schooling. Son Ki-jung is basically treading water, even if his test scores are great, and daughter Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi) is a gifted artist, but again, what can she do with that? They are handed a gift when an old friend of Ki-jung asks him for a favor – to take over as the English tutor for a rich high school girl, Da-hye (Ji-so Jung), because he has fallen for here, and doesn’t want to let any of his university friends slobber all over her as he studies aboard for the next year. He tells Ki-jung that the pay is good, and the mother, Yeon-kyo (Yeo-jeong Jo) is, well, kind of simple – although they have a ton of money. Thus begins the extremely entertaining first half of Parasite where the poor Kim family find ways, one at a time, to get hired by the wealthy Park family – in their beautiful modernist home, while lying to them about their identities throughout. Then comes a dark and stormy night – the return of who we thought was a minor character, and a trip to the basement that changes everything. All of a sudden, this black comedy of class warfare has become a horror movie we weren’t expecting. Where it goes from there, I won’t reveal here. Part of the fun is all the different twists and turns that drive the insane final hour of Parasite toward its tragic conclusion.

 

Bong has always been a great filmmaker – but I’m glad he went back to Korea for this film, rather than another international co-production like his last two films, Snowpiercer and Okja, which I think suffered a little bit from wanting to be bigger films – more blockbuster style filmmaking, rather than something like this, a more intimate, Hitchcock-ian thriller. There is something specifically Korean about this film – and this story – even if the themes are universal. The film is brilliantly well made – starting just from the production design, that creates not one, but two distinctive spaces - the Kim’s sad basement apartment, and the Park’s big, open concept mansion, both of which are space that drive home the themes of the movie. Bong’s camera placement here is also excellent – there is a shot here, on that first trip to the basement – that will haunt me forever.

 

What’s amazing about Parasite is just how entertaining a film it is. Even as the film grows darker and darker as it progresses, the film is among the most entertaining of the year to watch. It really isn’t until a scene late in the film – where Kang-ho Song admits that he has no plan that the weight of it all hits you. And even still, there’s a good 20 minutes to go here – a bloody climax, and then a heartbreaking final two shots. This is a film about class warfare – but one of the interesting things about it is that Bong doesn’t make the affluent Park’s into monsters – they are just wealthy people, with a limited perspective who don’t even realize what it is they are doing, and what impact it has. And for their part, the Kim’s are innocent either. What they are though is trapped – with no way out. And that is a very dangerous thing.