Film Review Parasite

Well we managed to see the Oscar award winner for best film, best director, and best everything else.  I will leave the Oscar votes aside along with the question of whether this film would have received the honor if there had been a more diverse set of options available in some of the other categories.  Our esteemed idiot of  a  president has apparently also become a film critic so it is only right that I, should sound off as well on something that I know nothing about.

Parasite probably should be called Mondo Parasitico as it starts off as a nicely amusing picture of what happens when a family of grifters living on the edge of poverty in a Korean slum gets a chance to make some easy money by becoming tutors, drivers, and housekeepers to a naïve stupidly rich upper class family.  With rapacious ingenuity they lock on to their new money tree like a like a lamprey to a game fish.  Then, what initially seems predicable, begins to veer off into Gothic fantasy.  This is the point where professional reviewers stop trying to tell the story and simply say they don’t want to spoil anything in the developing nightmare.

That leaves us time to think about what it all means. There is no question that the film highlights the contrast between the ultra modern home and spacious Garden of Eden yard of the wealthy and the basement hovel where our family of interlopers live along with the neighborhood drunk who pees regularly on the window outside their apartment. 

Director Bong June-ho is apparently well known in Korea for commenting on the inequality of modern society and taking great pleasure in creating sudden twists,  unexpected turns, and unsettling visuals.  My sense is that the film runs about thirty minutes too long and that the rapid changes at the end make the point rather too obviously.  As I said to my wife as the credits rolled, “Man, that was bizarre.”