Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is an absolute masterpiece.
It’s a film so overflowing with ideas and excitement that I left it overwhelmed with conflicting emotions. There was an uncomfortable sadness at seeing how far economic inequality had driven these incredibly likable characters. Along with that, there was a tinge of intellectual discomfort, forcing me to parse what the film says about our own connection with capitalism; and the dreams within. Most excitingly, though, I felt euphoria at watching one of cinema’s most unique voices create his magnum opus.
Bong Joon-ho’s always held a special place in my heart amongst directors. When I was very young and getting used to foreign cinema, my father took me to see his kaiju film, The Host. I remember, while watching the film, how amazed I could be, not at the film-making craft, but at the satire buried beneath. Having been raised primarily around American media, I had never seen a film so critical of the US while standing apart from it. Bong Joon-ho’s always been a remarkable film-maker, to be sure, but what always set him apart from his peers was his unique brand of satire.
For instance, his exceptional crime-drama Memories of Murder sells itself as a typical white-knuckle thriller. Upon reflection, many critics have referred to it as a pseudo-predecessor to Fincher’s Zodiac. Despite it’s admittedly intense thrills, though, the real meat comes with how clearly it expresses its anger towards police incompetency. The Host uses similar techniques, taking your typical monster movie setup to create a biting critique of American Interventionism in Korea. In fact, the film’s first scene, in which an American scientist demands his Korean assistant dump 400 bottles of formaldehyde into the the Han River, reflects a real life event in which a Korean mortician was ordered to dump formaldehyde by the US Military.
As the director moved state-side and began making his movies primarily in English, his satire unfortunately seemed to dull. Not that his movies were ever bad – the director has yet to make a full flop in my opinion – but his movies seemed to move from an angry viewpoint to a more detached observational place. His two mostly English-language films, Snowpiercer and Okja, seem to live entirely in allegory, creating detachments from the characters and their hardships, feeling rather more like an R-rated rendition of Animal Farm than stories about the true horrors in society.
Thus, when I heard Parasite would be the director’s first Korean film in almost ten years, it was incredibly easy for me to get excited. What sort of lessons would the director pull from his American projects? What would he leave behind? Of course I need not have worried, as Parasite is Bong Joon-ho’s best film to date.
Working with cinematographer Hong Kyong-pyo (who’s work in Snowpiercer and Burning is (beyond) exceptional), the team behind Parasite created one of the most visually delectable movies of the year, with an absurd attention to detail found throughout. The film changes visual styles almost invisibly, with the scenes in the Kim family’s sub-basement apartment resembling a Hirokazu Kore-Eda project. For contrast, the upper-class Park family’s manse use colder, more stylized framing, resembling a colorful Yorgos Lanthimos project.
It’s notable that I have spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the backstory of this film without diving into what its plot, but that’s because the script Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won wrote is so packed full of twists and turns that I don’t wish to spoil it for the uninitiated. For more curious readers, I’ll simply lay out the inciting incident.
The Kim family lives in a squalid semi-basement apartment. They are all unemployed, making due with manual labor gigs that often pay less than promised. When a family friend, Min announces that he has to go abroad for college, he suggests that the eldest Kim son, Ki-Woo (Choi Woo-shik) take over his role as English tutor for the Park family. Kim Ki-woo forges some documents to get past the entrance interview and begins teaching for the Park family, all while searching for other avenues for his family to earn a living.
This story escalates and shifts genres over and over again throughout it’s run-time, weaving from pseudo-heist, to farce, to horror, to drama, and back again. A lesser film-maker would most likely buckle under all that weight, Bong Joon-ho keeps the plates spinning throughout, culminating in a climactic party scene full of horror, joy, and sadness in equal measure.
But where does the movie leave us? What is it about? How do I talk about the biting satire and where it made me cry and laugh and feel emotions I don’t quite have a word for? I don’t know. But I do know that the film invariably clings to me. It points out something far more horrific about our current culture: that everything we know is wrong about our society may be too etched in our bones to truly escape. At several points during the film, a lower-class character thanks an absent wealthy employer for their good fortune, in the same way one might pray to God before a meal. It’s a testament to his work that I feel a similar sort of gratitude towards the director. In the words of the film: Bong Joon-ho! Respect!
The film will premiere at the 57th Annual New York Film Festival.
