Parasite (2019)
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
All unemployed, Ki-taek's family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks for their livelihood until they get entangled in an unexpected incident.
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In many ways, this feels like the culmination of inimitably Bongian preoccupations: his obsession with psychologically freighted subterranean spaces, stretching all the way back to his debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite ; immaculately executed whiplash moments that snap from comedy to tragedy; and a predilection for the surreal in his setpieces.
The fifty-year-old South Korean director’s work is impeccable, often absurd but also thrillingly precise; his other features are “Okja,” 2017; “Snowpiercer,” 2013; “Mother,” 2009; “The Host,” 2006; “Memories of Murder,” 2003; and “Barking Dogs Never Bite,” 2000.
Parasite is his seventh feature, following Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006), Mother (2009), Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017).
Bong Joon Ho, the sui generis South Korean auteur behind unclassifiable modern wonders like “Barking Dogs Never Bite” and “The Host,” has always made films that refuse to fit the narrow parameters of any particular genre.
It feels like the culmination of his ideas and his technical mastery, workshopped in excellent-in-their-own-right films like Snowpiercer, The Host, and Barking Dogs Never Bite.
The South Korean director Bong Joon-ho took the festival’s top prize for his virtuosic social satire Gisaengchung (Parasite), which was welcomed across the board as a return to form and perhaps even a career peak after a pair of conceptually elaborate if somewhat unwieldy international coproductions, Snowpiercer (2014) and Okja (2017).
A Palme d'Or winner from South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho of The Host, Snowpiercer, and Okja fame (among others), Parasite is a daringly original work that defies being boxed into a single genre, combining dark social satire with more than a touch of horror, a thriller, and tragedy all in one.
And while Parasite marks South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's third movie in a row to address themes of class, poverty, and capitalism, unlike Okja (2017) and Snowpiercer (2013) before it, Parasite is being billed as a "family tragicomedy" rather than a genre film, and does not star English-speaking Hollywood actors.
Directed and co-written by Joon-ho Bong, whose previous films have always dealt with class disparities (see “Snowpiercer,” where these themes are handled overtly), “Parasite” may be his most subtle and accomplished work to date.
Class divide is a popular topic in films, and it is a theme that director Bong Joon-ho has tackled before, in his sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer (2013).
Class warfare is one of Bong Joon-ho’s pet themes—take Snowpiercer , whose core metaphor is so blatant it’s barely a metaphor at all.
At times the plot teasingly recalls Joseph Losey's The Servant and Pier Paolo Pasoloni’s Theorem , poison-tipped parables about cunning social outcasts staging stealth home invasions against upper-class hosts.
Taking cues from classics of domestic intrigue such as Kim Ki-young’s “The Housemaid” (1960) and Joseph Losey’s “The Servant” (1963), they send this domestic drama vaulting into satire, suspense, terror and full-blown tragedy.
Of those films, the obvious point of reference for Parasite is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho , which Bong talked about at length during his BAFTA lecture.
Bong says “Parasite” was influenced by Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” but it had me thinking of the Woody Allen quote ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.’
The effect is similar to Hitchcock’s Psycho, but Parasite has far more characters who drive the plot forward.
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But I’d be surprised if Bong Joon ho didn’t see 2018’s Japanese Cannes Film Festival entry “Shoplifters,” and wasn’t inspired to whip up a funnier and more ambitious take on an underworld of low-rent grifters struggling to survive in the Golden Age of Income Inequality.
Early scenes of Parasite echo the beginning of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (which was my #1 film for 2018) by focusing on a family eking out an existence just above poverty-level by resorting to scams and dead-end odd-jobs (like folding hundreds of pizza delivery boxes).
But if much of the first part of the movie recalls the sweetness of the 2018 Japanese film “Shoplifters,” which also focused on a poor family doing anything to get by, “Parasite” — which taps into the fears and frustrations of class friction — ultimately goes for something darker and more twisted.
But while Hirokazu Kore-eda approached Shoplifters with an observational and intimate look at family and unconditional love, Bong Joon-ho aggressively careens towards us with an intoxicating twist of ideas and metaphors on social and economic inequality.
There is nothing much here that your reviewer can discern to frighten the horses, much like the Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda's Shoplifters , which won the Palme d'Or in 2018.
If last year’s Shoplifters, from Hirokazu Kore-eda, featured a Japanese family in similarly dire economic straits and gave them a hug, Parasite does the opposite.
This farce is an unsparing (though not uncompassionate) portrait of so many levels of South Korean society, reminiscent of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.
Much like his other works, Parasite navigates human morality in an interesting way that is not dissimilar to Patricia Highsmith’s stories, particularly those about Tom Ripley (though Hitchcock, who actually adapted Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, would be an apt cinematic parallel).
And the latter innings could remind some of Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us , especially regarding the transmutability of identity as it relates to money and class.
Its brilliant middle section pivots on the best reveal since Get Out’s invocation of the “sunken place,” and Bong’s sociology is no less potent than Jordan Peele’s.
In Get Out, it’s systemic racism; in Us, it’s privilege; in Midsommar, it’s grief.
Parasite goes from Shoplifters to Get Out to Sorry to Bother You in a breakneck way so unsettling you don't notice it happening.
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Así como Buñuel presentaba la versión del submundo de los pobres en Los Olvidados, Bong Joon Ho va un poco más allá para personalizar su respuesta en manos de una familia que merece más que el reconocimiento y el dinero.
From the underground dwelling of Ki-Woo’s family, their window always a target for drunken public urination, to the Park’s incredible designed chateau of glass and stone, to the petty grievances that grow on each family’s psyches, all is very reminiscent of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park in a thematic way.