Review: Parasite

Image courtesy of Neon.

Once again incorporating elements of genre, while at the same time defying them by vacillating between tones and moods, Bong Joon Ho's Palm d'Or winner "Parasite" is every bit as good as you've heard. This bleak, hilarious, violent and strangely moving tale of the haves vs. the have nots is the Korean director's latest thrilling take on the structural inequality that has become a topic du jour around the globe in recent years.

Following two fantasies that tackled the subject - the very good "Snowpiercer" and "Okja" - the director's latest is more down to earth in its storytelling, although the director's flare for the fantastic is only kept at bay for so long.

The film starts out as a comedy, of sorts, as a young man named Kim Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi) who lives in squalor with his semi-con artist family - father Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song), mother Chung-sook (Hye-jin Jang) and teenage sister Ki-jung (So-dam Park) - is given a golden opportunity: a more well-to-do friend is leaving to go abroad and suggests that Ki-woo take over his position as tutor to a rich young girl named Da-hye (Ji-so Jung).

Ki-woo manages to impress Da-hye's easily fooled mother, Yeon-kyo (Yeo-jeong Jo), and then somehow finagles his sister into a job tutoring the rich family's hyperactive son, Da-song (Hyun-jun Jung), as well as nabbing a maid job for his mother and a driver gig for his father, who shuttles around Yeon-kyo's businessman husband, Dong-ik (Sun-kyun Lee).

The catch is that the entire Kim family pretends as if they are not related as a scheme to bring in more money in the hope that they can escape their impoverished way of life. However, a few people stand in their way - the Parks' current driver and a longtime housemaid named Moon-gwang (Jeong-eun Lee), who had worked for the previous owner of the house, a rich architect. These people are easily pushed aside at first, although one later returns and stumbles upon the Kims' plot. As it turns out, Moon-gwang is harboring her own secret in the basement of the Parks' luxurious pad.

Part social commentary and part Hitchcockian thriller - all the while a Bong Joon Ho picture in every way - "Parasite" juggles its various tones deftly, moving from sly comedy with a satiric dose of social commentary to bloody thriller without one hardly noticing the change in mood. It's difficult to switch back and forth as the director does here, but he manages to do so impressively. And just when you think the film has settled on a violent and bleak finale, you get a coda that powerfully drives home the filmmaker's thoughts on income inequality.

There is much humor to be found in the film's first half and more than a few plot twists and nerve jangling moments later in the picture that would feel at home in a classic thriller, but it's the way that the director does so while also exploring the injustices the rich heap upon the lower class that serves them and the resentment built up by those who are at the mercy of others with greater economic status that's so impressive in "Parasite."

When all eventually explodes, it's less cathartic than it is horrifying. A final, naive letter from one character who survives the melee to another powerfully drives home the hopelessness of the cycle in which several of the film's characters are stuck. "Parasite" is a real stunner, and certainly one of the year's best movies.