Directed by Bong Joon Ho

Written by Bong Joon Ho and Jin Won Han

Starring: Kang ho-Song, Yeo-jeong Jo, So-dam Park, Woo-sik Choi,

Parasite is a movie about two families, the Kims and the Parks, but really is a deep commentary on the disparity between the rich and the poor. Joker tried to tackle that theme earlier this month, and here now is the difference: that movie tried way too hard to be relevant, while Parasite just is relevant. Yes, that is a great thing. This is a really good film.

That topic seems lazy to portray these days, since every other movie coming out seems to be about the widening wage gap everywhere. But it’s become such a problem all over the world that we can understand why it’s what the movies are all exposing. The director Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 movie Snowpiercer was also about the same thing. Awesome movie btw

Parasite opens on the Kims, a family so poor they survive in what can barely be called a basement. The first shot lingers from the inside out through a window on street level, and then sinks even lower to show their tiny living quarters. The walls and floor are as unclean as you’d expect, the hallway is wide enough for one person to walk through, and they all eat on the floor. The kids, Ki-woo and Ki-Jung, scrounge around with their phones held up, leeching off their neighbors wifi. The father, Ki-taek (played by Kang-ho Song, who was also in Snowpiercer), calmly sits and practices folding pizza boxes for a shitty side gig. The mom Hung-sook barks impatiently at their continuing circumstances. The father doesn’t mind, he is always making plans.

As chance would have it, Ki-woo’s college friend Min visits the family with a good luck rock. He informs Ki-woo he will be out of town for a while, and wants him to tutor the high school girl he has been teaching English. Why Ki-woo? Cause he knows he doesn’t have a chance with her.

His sister Ki-Jung photoshops all the necessary documents to forge for him to show credentials to tutor this rich girl. It is amazing that the movie shows how hard the Kims work at being con artists. I don’t want to spoil the fun of how the Kims suredly place themselves in the rich family Parks establishment.

The Parks live in luscious conditions. A house with an entirely glass back half looking onto a comically perfect lawn. The mother Yeon-kyo is embarrassingly gullible and naive. It’s part of why Ki-woo almost immediately is accepted as her daughter’s new tutor. The other members of the Kim family con their way into roles that the Parks desire. How or why this is I cannot tell you, for that’s the whole journey of the movie. I was surprised just how much fun I was having watching these poor people con the rich against their incompetent judgement. The is all because Bong’s script and direction are so clever in movement, that we understand each moving action and beat. And more importantly, we believe it. I love that the dirt poor Kim’s are shown to be ingenious individuals, they are not dumb or uneducated. They’re so brilliant in their conning you kind of wonder why they couldn’t make it doing real jobs. It’s because the system has failed them, and failed all of us. That’s part of the message.

The Kims by contrast are not intelligent people. They are oblivious to even the most obvious details around them, ignoring people standing right by them. You wonder how people so unremarkable could be so rich. Another message. The reveals later in the story delve deeper into these themes, and show buried truths about classes and greed and envy. Someone’s always got it worse than you, someone’s always going to want what you have. But some, just some, are pleased exactly where they are.

There’s an incredibly long sequence in the movie where I gritted my teeth, and tensed up violently hanging on each moment. The audience I was with did too, and it’s a testament of Boon’s direction that that level of suspense could be held for so long. He is unquestionably a master.

But I hesitate to call Parasite great because the climax towards the end devolves goofily. Always it was building to darker moments and twists, but I found the final parts to be silly. Still, it ends well enough, and the final shot cements Bong’s take on economic ruin and what we are all doomed to. Most of the movie is funnier than you might think given this material. It’s basically a dark satire.

People may have a problem with this, and how the movie seemingly snaps across a genre in an instant, and maybe that’s what threw me off about the end. I dunno, I liked how funny and dark it was, but then what it built too almost seemed to come out of nowhere. Almost.

Overall I really liked Parasite despite my conflicted feelings on its pre-ending. In a time when we are flooded by movies about social and class warfare, it rises above as one of the better treatments. The subtext has been done to death poorly that I’m sick of it in bad films now. Dark Knight Rises was fucking this shit up up 7 years ago. And how I cringed throughout that entire film. Joker is a lazy man’s answer to this material, and I have a disgustingly awful feeling in my gut the academy will reward it in some sort of embarrassed admittance of what they did to Infinity War last year was wrong. Shame on the entire Academy. We can want better from the movies.

I’ll end on a line Ki-taek says to his son, when they both find themselves somewhere they don’t expect for the night. It has stuck with me since I left the theater

“You know what plan never fails? No plan.”