Parasite Review

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was the big awards’ winner of the 2019/2020 season, earning awards like Best Picture at the Academy Awards and the Palme d’Or at Cannes. But was it worthy of the accolades?

The Kims are a poor, under-employed family. They live in a basement, leach off others for wifi, and make pizza boxes for a living. The son, Ki-jung (Park So-dam) gets hired to tutor a high-school student from a wealthy family and sees it as an opportunity to get his family hired as their staff. The Kims scheme together and manipulate the Parks so they can find employment.

Bong Joon-ho is known for being a director who mixed-genre cinema with political themes.  His monster film, The Host, was a criticism of American military leadership in Korea, Snowpiecer was a dystopia where the poor underclass launch an uprising against the ruling elite, and Okja was about animal welfare and the meat industry. He’s able to make incredibly entertaining films that are filled with a lot of substance. Parasite continues with that trend – it was a funny film that was filled with class politics. Being a thriller, Parasite was able to appeal more towards the art-house and awards crowds. Parasite was a film filled with so much symbolism that university students will be able to write numerous essays on the film.

The Western perception of South Korea is it’s a wealthy, technologically advanced nation with a lot of the people having high degrees of education. Parasite sets out to dispel that myth. The themes of class inequality, youth underemployment, and poverty are universal and Bong was able to present this in an entertaining manner.  Parasite also has some more Korean specific issues like references to the North, and many people being indebted to loan sharks.

Although the Kims were living in dire straits there weren’t exactly sympathetic. They lied, cheated, and manipulated their way into the Parks’ lives. The Kims were so ruthless that they step over working people just so they get ahead. It shows a dog-eat-dog world where the working classes are pitted against themselves.

The Parks were at worst naive and oblivious. They weren’t bad people and they are friendly to the Kims: especially, Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun).  It was a more nuanced view than some other directors would have done. The easy route would have been to show the rich family as entitled, selfish and downright evil. The filmmakers know most people aren’t like that. This was done because Bong wanted to show the upper-middle classes were more indifferent and unaware of the plight of the poor. The Kims used Park Chung-sook’s (Jang Hye-jin) gullibility and her love for her children to their advantage.

The Kims do seem to succeed in their usurpation pretty early in the film, leading to an effective twist. It turns Parasite into an even darker film and felt like something one of Bong’s Korean contemporaries like Park Chan-wook and Kim Jee-woon would have made. It became a mission for the Kims having to hide what they have done.

I personally preferred Bong’s previous films but I put that down to me being genre fan. Bong shows off his talents as a writer and director by making an enthralling film that was comedic, dramatic and filled with his usual economic themes.