CJ Entertainment
“Parasite” (or Gisaengchung), by Bong Joon Ho
Early on in Parasite, the character Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik) tips viewers off with a line of dialogue the pivotal character later repeats: “It’s metaphorical.” Indeed, Korean co-writer/director Bong Joon Ho’s 131-minute feature, which won the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or—Europe’s equivalent to the Best Picture Oscar—is a gripping parable that will have audiences alternately chuckling, sitting at the edge of their seats and clutching their armrests. Parasite is reminiscent of films by Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, such as 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, full of sly subversive wit and movie metaphors.
Moviegoers familiar with the oeuvre of Bong, who has a taste for the macabre and offbeat, will be prepared to decipher the symbolism lurking beneath the surface of Parasite (or Gisaengchung), which combines elements of social realism, dark comedy, and horror. Bong’s strikingly visual 2013 Snowpiercer, for example, is an allegory about class struggle and climate change cloaked in sci-fi conventions, starring a mostly Western cast, including Ed Harris, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, and Octavia Spencer.
Snowpiercer also co-starred Song Kang Ho, and in Parasite this top Korean actor returns home, portraying out-of-work driver Ki-taek, head of a down-on-their-heels family surviving through grifting and a variety of odd jobs, such as folding pizza boxes. Indeed, the Kims are literally underclass, subsisting in a basement apartment so grubby that outside their street level window an inebriated passerby repeatedly urinates on the sidewalk just outside. At first, the Kims have such low esteem they don’t even challenge the drunkard’s breach of public etiquette. It’s as if they deserve to be pissed on.
Moviegoers familiar with the oeuvre of Bong, who has a taste for the macabre and offbeat, will be prepared to decipher the symbolism lurking beneath the surface of Parasite.
The unemployed Kims’ fortunes change when Min-hyuk (Park Seo-joon) leaves South Korea to study overseas, and suggests to his friend Ki-woo that he takeover his gig tutoring Da-hye Park (Jung Ziso). Ever on the make, despite having failed his university entrance exam, Ki-woo misrepresents himself to Mrs. Yeon-kyo Park (Cho Yeo Jeong) who, as the head of the Parks’ posh home, hires the imposter to tutor her spoiled teenage daughter Da-hye .
Thus, the proverbial camel’s nose is inside the tent, and soon all of the Kims work their wiles to gain egress to the unsuspecting Parks’ well-to-do household. Ki-woo’s younger sister Ki-jung (Park So Dam), a Photoshop whiz kid adept at forging credentials and doubletalk, cons Mrs. Park into hiring her as an “art therapist” for Cub Scout Da-song (Jung Hyeon Jun), her second-grader son, a zealot for Native American culture who loves camping out in the backyard in an ersatz teepee.
Next, Ki-jung conspires to have the chauffeur of Mr. Park (Lee Sun Kyun), CEO of a global IT firm, fired, to be replaced by—you guessed it!—Ki-taek.
This leaves only the Kims’ matriarch, Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin), jobless. However, getting mom onto the clueless Parks’ payroll proves to be the most challenging prospect, as the scam artists plot to get rid of proficient live-in housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jung Eun). By ruthlessly exploiting her allergy, the Kims finally dispose of Moon-gwang—or so they think. For the time being, under a series of false pretenses, the foursome are bankrolled by the bourgeois Parks, who have no idea their household help are father, mother, son and daughter (which, of course, mirrors the Park family).
For a while the Kims are in the money, but things quickly go south when the Kims discover that there is, shall we say, an underground component to the Parks’ mansion. Parasite suddenly morphs from a Patricia Highsmith milieu of Mr. Ripley-like talented con artists to a Stephen King-type house of horrors tale.
After the Korean War devastated Seoul (where Parasite was partially shot and is presumably set) and the rest of South Korea in the 1950s, U.S. and foreign capital poured into the southern half of the peninsula, rebuilding most of it from scratch.
When I visited South Korea in the 1990s everything appeared to be brand new and the country struck me as more modern than America. But Bong Joon Ho shines a light on the class conflict that lies below the appearance of affluence, and on those who have been left behind by this seeming Asian economic miracle. Parasite also has biting references to North Korea, with Chung-sook hilariously mimicking the bombastic ballyhooing of DPRK news readers on state-run TV.
Bong’s film imaginatively mixes gallows humor, horror, and dreams, and the grand finale channels the chaos from another Cannes’ Palme d’Or winner, Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 If…., which captured the zeitgeist of student revolution then sweeping the globe.
Although Bong’s mind-boggling movie is more than two hours long, there isn’t a dull moment. Parasite is out-of-sight and theatrically opens in New York and Los Angeles October 11.