You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all.
On the surface, Parasite is a pretty simple story. There’s a poor family (father-mother-daughter-son) and they, through a stroke of good luck, manage to meet up with a wealthy family (father-mother-daughter-son) and the poor family decides that it’s in their best interest to kind of soak this wealthy family for some of their money. Not in a malicious way; it’s just that here’s a family with money to burn, so they might as well burn it on us as anybody else. But from that very simple set-up, Bong uses all of his many talents to craft a kind of indescribable film. So, don’t worry; no spoilers. I went into this movie having not even seen the trailer and you should also go in knowing as little as possible. Bong has a lot of facility with genre and he uses all of it here. At times, the film has a kind of heist movie or hustle movie energy; sometimes it’s darkly comedic, at other times deadly serious; and at times, Bong borrows from the genres of the psychological thriller and horror to unsettle and unnerve the audience. He has an incredible ensemble of actors here. I was going to mention the stand-out performances, but then I realized that I think there’s a solid seven performances here that, in any other movie, I’d call a “stand-out,” so I think maybe it’s best to just say that everyone is ******* great and leave it at that.
The script is incredibly smart at both digging into its characters and also digging into its themes. It’s a movie that has a lot of really serious social points to make and it does so with, quite often, the force of a stinging slap to the face, but it doesn’t feel overdone or preachy, just forceful and incisive. The film has all the nihilism that an exploration of late-stage Capitalism needs; at a certain point you realize that the film isn’t just about castigating the rich; it’s about pointing out that even when you feel like you’re on the bottom, even your small comforts are gained at the expense of someone else’s suffering. And the script speaks compellingly through all the characters, not just a few. But for all the greatness of the script, I think it’s actually the images of this film that are going to stay with me the longest, images that seem to speak as loudly as any dialogue about the state of our world today. Water flowing down a stairwell as a character pauses to watch it wash over their shoes. A character sitting on a closed toilet lid, trying to check her phone and simultaneously hold back a geyser of sewage. Two characters standing together, one weeping, the other trying unsuccessfully to hold back muffled laughter. A frightened child eating cake on the floor. I don’t entirely know why those images and some others hit me as hard as they did, but they seem to somehow speak to the moment we live. There are a lot of staircases in this movie, actually, and a lot of memorable images around them. Maybe this movie ends up resting its case on the troubling reality where we live. We live in a world where every misfortune flows downhill as surely as flood waters down a stairwell. Until it doesn’t, that is. As that toilet reminds us, that’s the moment everything blows sky high and when it happens, we’ll be checking Twitter, pretending we don’t see it coming. Enjoy your cake, kid; and try not to look at what’s coming up the stairs. 4 stars.
tl;dr – brilliant film wraps biting, grim social commentary in a darkly comedic, often unsettling thriller; a whip-smart script & a fantastic ensemble make this one of the defining films of the era. 4 stars.