Review: Parasite (2019)
By now we've probably all seen Bong Joonho's 2019 international mega-hit, Parasite. It came seemingly out of nowhere to clean house at the Oscars and set a stage for the callout of callouts to American viewers: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films." While Parasite is fundamentally Korean and therefore not every detail is noticeable across every audience, social hierarchy isn't a foreign concept.
Parasite is one of many Bong Joonho films that explores class and the ways people are affected by their own status—largely how the rich depend on the poor to live, and the poor have no choice but to take the opportunities they can get. While this is simple enough to read, and it's pretty straightforward in his other films I've seen, none are quite so black-and-white as in Parasite. While it's worth the hype in composition alone—the writing and cinematography demand their own article, honestly—this one's about the story.
The movie explores class discrimination by following the Kim family as they integrate themselves into the Park family's household as employees, and it all starts with a proposition to the Kims’s son, Kiwoo (Choi Woosik). An opportunity is presented to him by a friend (Park Seojoon), who asks him to take over as the Parks’s teenage daughter Dahye's (Jung Jiso) English tutor while he studies abroad. While he insists that it's because the job is easy, and he trusts Kiwoo to handle it with care, there's an implication that he also sees Kiwoo as generally inferior to himself when he includes that he doesn't want some other guy slavering over Dahye while he's away.
Kiwoo thinks nothing of it and takes the job with nary an interview needed. It doesn't take long for him to convince the mother and trophy wife, Park Yeonkyo (Cho Yeojeong), that their energetic young son could benefit from art therapy. Enter his sister, Kijung (Park Sodam)—posing as Kiwoo's acquaintance “Jessica”—who flawlessly forged her diploma from the prestigious Yonsei University and read a Wikipedia page about art therapy before showing up for her interview and passing with flying colors. With both Kim children in the house, it doesn't take long for them to con their way into getting their parents to employ as the Parks’s maid and chauffeur.
From the initial stacking of story elements and on, Parasite becomes a balancing act of the Kims performing their daily duties without letting on that they aren't who they claim to be, which hinges entirely on the oblivious Park family being so used to having employees occupying their spacious and nearly-empty home that they hardly notice them. The social commentary comes in many forms, in microaggressions and large dismissive gestures alike, but also in the Kim family's efforts to stay employed in the Park home—their success comes from climbing over others like them.
While the Kims perform their long-con, there's an inset reality that it's successful in part because they're all actually good at their jobs, and one can spend the entirety of the film thinking on which parasite the title refers to, as the Kim and Park families leech off of each other in different ways. If that's not enough to consider, the ending's double tap, in case you'd held onto a shred of hope, is haunting enough to occupy your cranium for days afterward.
As a final note, and this one is personal, the element of the Park family's son being “really into Indians” was a particular rub in the wrong direction. There's an argument to be made that that story element is a caricature of capitalism's tendency to commodify complex cultures—and that much is true—but there's no way to know if that truly was the intent or if it's stylistic erasure of Indigenous people that's reached far overseas. There's a whole other article to be written on this topic, though, so I'll save it for another day.