A poor family, the Kims, con their way into becoming the servants of the privileged Park family. But complications arise when their deception is threatened with exposure… Bong Joon-ho’s film won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2019 and four Academy Awards including Best Picture in 2020.
You have to admire Bong Joon-ho – first he tells Americans to learn to read subtitles, calls the Oscars “a local film festival” then sweeps off with a wheelbarrow full of awards, even managing to piss off Donald Trump in the process. Now, that’s overachieving. But as the hype starts to settle – is Parasite really as good as everyone says?
Short answer: yes. Wait, come back, keep reading! You want to know why, right?
A dark satire on late stage capitalism, Parasite centres on the Kim family. Crammed into their squalid semi-basement flat, stealing their neighbours’ wifi and folding pizza boxes for cash, their luck starts to change when the son Ki-woo (Train to Busan’s Choi Woo-shik) is asked by a friend to cover his role tutoring the daughter of a wealthy family while he’s overseas.
So starts the most fun part of the movie, as Ki-woo, fake credentials in hand, uses his foothold into the Park home to inveigle his whole family into their employ under false pretences, masterminded by his coolly sly sister, Ki-jung (Park So-dam).
In truth, this was my favourite part of the film: I would happily watch an entire film and couple of spin off series of Ki-jung and her scrappy family running long cons on rich people. (Get on that, HBO! In fact, I’m hoping that is what the mooted Parasite TV series is actually about…) It’s impossible not to root for these pesky kids as they use a barrage of tricks to turn the Parks against their driver and housekeeper, getting their own parents hired in return.
But, of course, darkly satirical attacks on late stage capitalism never stay cheery for long, and once the family are established in their cushy new gig, things start to unravel at alarming speed, building to a bloody, violent conclusion.
Like the architecture of the house that anchors this exquisitely designed film, Parasite works on many levels.
It resists the urge to make the rich monsters, or the poor flawless. The Parks are not evil – though there’s a strong suggestion their spoiled son, Da-song, will grow up to be a bit of a tyrant – but they are entitled and oblivious to their own privilege.
This makes them vulnerable – they’re only too happy to accept recommendations from each of the Kim family as they infiltrate in turn, since once they are in the gilded circle, they automatically become more trustworthy – and it makes them careless. A storm that decimates the city’s slums is seen simply as good for their garden; Ki-woo is renamed “Kevin” on the whim of Mrs Park.
The film deftly skewers this privilege. It’s exceptional on how the petty humiliations of poverty accumulate, and how they can boil over. But it’s also not blind to how the poor, left battling for scraps, too often turn on one another rather than the wealthy.
If the Kims think their semi-basement is bad, with its view of drunks pissing in the street outside their windows, they soon find out there are worse ways to live – as they discover the fired housekeeper’s secret, that her debt-ridden husband has been hiding in the concrete bunker under the house’s basement.
The Parks, of course, are blissfully unaware of what is happening literally beneath them, but instead of the Kims seeing Moon-gwang and her spouse as natural allies (there’s no reason, after all, he couldn’t keep living there), it’s the scrabble over who has rights to the Park home that starts the spiral into catastrophe.
Bong Joon-ho – who co-wrote the film with Han Jin-won – has assembled a top-notch cast to do his vision justice. Long-time collaborator Song Kang-ho makes a welcome appearance as the Kim family patriarch and it’s his subtle metamorphosis from well-meaning dad to agent of righteous fury as the drip-drip scorn of his employers starts to bite that powers the film. (De Niro to Bong’s Scorsese, Song worked with the director on his breakthrough film Memories of Murder as well as on Snowpiercer and The Host).
Cho Yeo-jeong is a delight as the naïve Mrs Park, while Lee Sun-kyun is pleasingly smug as her husband. Lee Jung-eun hams it up as the fallen housekeeper, and Chang Hyae-jin as Kim Chung-sook is sympathetic.
But the young cast hold up well against their elders – Choi Woo-shik (who was also in Bong’s Okja) is heart-breaking as the idealistic Ki-woo, while as Ki-jung, Park So-dam oozes the kind of cool us lesser mortals can only aspire to.
Tracey Sinclair is a freelance writer and editor. She writes regularly for online and print publications including Exeunt and The Stage, and is the author of eight books. A former subtitler and eternal geek, Tracey has a particular interest in Korean, Japanese and French films and anything to do with space or superheroes. You can follow her on Twitter under the profoundly misleading name @thriftygal
Watch the trailer, and scroll down for more images:
Parasite images
Such an amazing and insightful review! I really enjoyed reading this!!