In modern day South Korea, Dong ik Park (Sun Kyun Lee) lives in a beautiful home built by an architect with his wife, Yeon Kyo Park (Yeo Jeong Jo) and two children, their teenage daughter, Da Hye, (Ji So Jung) and young son, Da Song, (Hyun Jun Jung) Yeon Kyo thinks Da Song is gifted. Being a family of means, they have a housekeeper, Moon Gwang (Jeon Eun Lee) and a driver, Yoon (Kuen Rok Park). The Kim family is a family of grifters and conmen. Mrs. Park hires Ki Woo Kim (Woo Sik Choi) as a tutor for Da Hye, based on a recommendation from her old tutor, Min (Seo Joon Park) who is a friend of Ki Woo. Ki Woo introduces his sister, as Jennifer a specialist in art and psychology and Mrs. Park hires her to tutor her son, “Jennifer” (So dam Park) enacts a plan to get rid of the Park family driver, and replace him with her father, Ki Taek Kim, (Kang Ho Song) who in turn sabotages the previous housekeeper, and creates a fake agency, and recommends his wife, Chung Sook (Hye Jin Jang) to take the old housekeeper’s place.
When the Kim family is firmly ensconced in the Park home, the Park family decides to go camping to placate Da Song. The Kim family takes full advantage of the Park family’s absence to have a little party for themselves, they drink the Parks’ expensive liquor, and celebrate their latest con. As they are celebrating their newfound luck in cheating their way to an upper class lifestyle, the doorbell rings. Who is at the door? Does their plan stay intact? Or is their perfect plan starting to unravel?
The title of the movie gives away how the writers feel about the Kim family, but what about the Park family, are they portrayed sympathetically? No, they are not, Parasite is very much a movie about class in South Korea. The classes seem much more stratified and rigid there, the servants know their place, and the upper classes as illustrated by the Park family, are self-absorbed, materialistic, happily oblivious to those who care for their children and themselves, and think their money can buy loyalty. The servant class comes across no better, they are so desperate to keep what little they have they will resort to anything to maintain the status quo. So it would be understandable if a viewer felt a sense of ambivalence towards these characters, because there are no protagonists or antagonists in this movie, just people showing the basest form of human nature. It’s very similar to the Jordan Peele film Us, another class-based movie with both comedic and horror flourishes. Us gives its intentions away much sooner than Parasite does, Parasites plays its hand much closer to the vest
Parasite is not an instant classic because some of the ways the Kims extract themselves from sticky situations are right out of American sit coms. The members of each family are little more than caricatures tothe classes they represent. A little more subtlety in the writing would have done this film a world of good. There is some truly funny political commentary about North Korea, but this is mostly a very dark movie, with an ending that seems aimed more at an American audience than an Asian audience. The ending ruins what was a very suspenseful sometimes funny, often disturbing, look into life in South Korea.
The acting is very good in Parasite, Sun Kyun Lee is very good as the patriarch of the Park family, he’s a rich, entitled man, at the top of the heap in South Korean society, and he lords it over people. Lee plays this role with emotionless precision. The writers should have given his character more layers, but that’s not the actor’s fault. Yeo Jeong Jo plays her character as a naïve gullible housewife, whose biggest concern is planning a birthday party for her spoiled son. It is hard not to feel sorry for her, and that’s a testament to how well she played this character. Kang Ho Song’s character is essentially an unlikable person, but there’s just enough in the script to make him sympathetic, and he capitalizes on those moments, to make his character more human, if not completely sympathetic. Hye Jin Jang plays the least sympathetic of the Kim family, and almost succeeds in humanizing her.
Director Bong Joon Ho uses a lot of visual cues to symbolize that this film is not going to be a normal journey. He films a street slightly off center, he takes a lot of crane shots, and tracking shots, one is especially noteworthy, when the viewer follows a character into a secret bunker. It’s thrilling, like a roller coaster. The pacing is good, he calls it the ‘rhythm’ of the film, and the performances are excellent. He should win best director tonight, maybe not best screenplay, but definitely best director, maybe Best Picture, of the three nominees that I’ve seen, it is the best picture. Bong Joon Ho also wrote Snowpiercer, also about class struggles, which was not nearly as good as Parasite.
Parasite: It loses its Seoul with a poorly written ending.
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