Raymond's Rambunctious Rants

A Parasitical Purpose

Raymond Meng

Parasite is unlike anything anybody has ever seen before. It defies any single genre and can be considered both a mainstream crowd-pleaser and an arthouse masterpiece. The film’s seamless metaphorical shots resound deeply in the viewer’s tumultuous experience.

We meet the impoverished Kim family. They are unemployed and work as pizza box folders. They rely on neighboring cafes for wifi, leave their windows open so the street fumigators will also kill their stink- bug infestation, and watch helplessly as local drunks piss on the road above them. They’ve seen better days. Life is hard.

The Kims, we soon learn, are smart and almost Machiavellian in their ingenuity. When an opportunity presents itself for Ki-woo, the son, to engage pose as an English-language teacher for the teenage daughter of the wealthy Park family, they seize it. The Parks, on the other hand, are in every sense the economic and social opposites of the Kims. They live in a grand, modernist mansion in a hilly Seoul suburb. Their deeply detached privilege ensures that the Kim family, one-by-one, manages to swindle their way into the family home, without it ever seeming implausible.

The script, written by Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won, has the thick, suspenseful plotting of the best thrillers: sometimes stressful, sometimes darkly funny, always artfully constructed, telegraphs and callbacks everywhere.

If anything, the Kims’ plan goes too well, because we soon realize something has to go wrong. Where will the conflict come from? We soon find out that the house at which the Kim family works holds a dark secret. Something that makes it, again, difficult to talk about without veering into spoilers.

What is extremely unique about this movie is the language of the film (Korean). What’s even more interesting is that this is the first foreign-language film ever to win the most prestigious Oscar award.

It is hard not to watch it on the edge of your seat. The script was written for the theater but the experience feels like it should only be had in a packed cinema, where the crowd reactions will play as important as anything happening on screen. Even in its later, more melancholy moments, it is never anything less than utterly compelling. Parasite somehow manages to scratch every cinematic itch you have and offers up a cinematic masterpiece. Frankly, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime film. And it’s one everyone won’t be able to stop talking about.