Parasite is a difficult film to talk about. It defies any easy pigeonhole, wriggles free from slotting into a single genre, can be considered both a mainstream crowd-pleaser and an arthouse masterpiece — and is, undeniably, a film best enjoyed going in blind, its delicious and shocking surprises ideally experienced as innocently and obliviously as possible. So, finding words to describe it are hard. If there’s one word that can best sum it up, it’s the director: Bong Joon Ho.
Parasite is pure Bong, which is to say that it is many things at once. From his 2000 debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite, onwards, the Korean auteur has had an itchy, restless mind, never settling on tone or subject matter, darting from horror to thriller to dystopian sci-fi to vegan monster movie — sometimes within the same film — sucking up influences from both Hollywood (Spielberg, Hitchcock) and his native Korea (Kim Ki-young, Lee Chang-dong) along the way. His hallmark is his multitudes.
This, his seventh film, is different again; after the futuristic stylings of Okja and Snowpiercer, Parasite initially snaps into something resembling contemporary social realism. We meet the impoverished Kim family — parents Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin), and their adult children Ki-jung (So-dam Park) and Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) — living in a squalid semi-basement apartment. They are unemployed and apparently unemployable. They steal whatever free Wi-Fi their cheap phones can pick up, leave their windows open so the street fumigators will also kill their stink- bug infestation, and watch helplessly as local drunks piss on the road above them.
They’ve seen better days. Life is hard. But this is no Ken Loach tragedy. The Kims, we soon learn, are quixotically ambitious and almost Machiavellian in their ingenuity. When an opportunity presents itself for Ki-woo, the son, to engage in some light subterfuge by posing as an English-language teacher for the teenage daughter of the wealthy Park family, they seize it. There seems to be no question among them: the Kims are a united front from the start, and will embark in whatever professional bullshittery they need to lift themselves up.
The Parks, on the other hand, are in every sense the economic and social opposites of the Kims. They live in a grand, modernist mansion in a hilly Seoul suburb; the aloof Park patriarch, Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun), is head of some faceless IT company, while his stay-at-home wife Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) frets about their troubled children alongside a permanent housekeeper (Lee Jung-eun). Their deeply detached privilege ensures that the Kim family, one-by-one, manage to swindle their way into the family home, without it ever seeming implausible.
Manages to scratch every cinematic itch you have and offers more up you didn’t know you had.
And so the first hour of the film plays out like a conman caper, with all the pace and fizz of an Ocean’s Eleven. There is a wicked joy to be had in watching the Kims’ ingenious scheme unfurl, piece by piece: a carefully placed pair of knickers here, a scraping of peach skin there. The script, written by Bong and Han Jin-won, has the thick, suspenseful plotting of the best thrillers: sometimes stressful, sometimes darkly funny, always artfully constructed, telegraphs and callbacks everywhere.
If anything, the Kims’ plan goes too well, because we soon realise something has to go wrong. Where will the conflict come from? Surely their elaborate gambit will be foiled? Bong’s masterstroke is to take that tension and use it against us, to subvert our expectations wildly, to present unexpected challenges to his characters and veer into different genres and tones, to turn the film into something different entirely. Something that makes it, again, difficult to talk about without veering into spoilers.
What we can talk about is the astonishing craft on display here. This is a filmmaker who knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. His camera moves and glides with total assurance and conviction, every pan and dolly deliberate. It is, among many achievements, a remarkably well-edited film, the rhythms and pace guiding us through his chosen themes with such care that there is no mystery of its intention.
It is, fundamentally, a film about the haves and have-nots. Sometimes the commentary is worn on its sleeve: one character repeatedly notes how “metaphorical” things are, perhaps a self-mocking nod to the director himself, who floods his films with meaning. Even that title is hugely instructive: the Kims, it’s clear, are as parasitic as the stink bugs that infest their squalid home, leeching off the wealth of others — but so, too, are the Parks, a family rendered infantile and helpless by their fortune, unable to complete basic tasks without enlisting working-class servants to refine their lives.
Baked into this theme of inequality is the ambiguity of it all. There are no villains here. The rich Park family are obnoxious, but ultimately nice — though, as the Kim matriarch notes with a poisonous tone, “They’re nice because they’re rich.” The poor Kim family are liars, scoundrels, and criminals, if you wanted to get technical about it — yet they’re essentially only conning their way into menial working-class jobs. It’s not exactly the kind of take Danny Ocean would go for. They’re just doing what they can to survive. If there’s a villain here, it’s capitalism, and the structures that force people into indignity, desperation and naked self-interest. With a typical tonal rollercoaster, Bong gives the film an extraordinary bittersweet ending, offering sun-dappled hope as quickly as it offers a tangy note of downbeat, realist cynicism, and one that forces us to confront where we sit in the upstairs-downstairs riddle.
But talk of capitalist allegories and social commentary should not detract from just how insanely entertaining this film is. It is hard not to watch it rapt and gobsmacked, your jaw permanently near the floor. The script was written for the theatre but the experience feels like it should only be had in a packed cinema, where the crowd reactions will play as importantly as anything happening on screen. Even in its later, more melancholy moments, it is never anything less than utterly compelling. Parasite somehow manages to scratch every cinematic itch you have and offers more up you didn’t know you had. Frankly, it’s everything you want from a film. And it’s one you won’t be able to stop talking about.
