It’s hard to classify or compare Bong Joon Ho’s (Snowpiercer, Okja) Parasite to any other movie I’ve ever seen. From the first frame until the last, it comes together as a unique film that reminded me of Get Out and A Quiet Place in the sense that you know you are seeing something extraordinary and something that you have no idea where it comes from or where it’s going. These three movies are entirely different but follow the same formula of capturing your audience in the first scene and never giving them a chance to spin out of the web you hope you are creating for them.
Ki-woo Kim/Kevin (Woo-sik Choi) lives in a tiny shell of a dwelling with his sister Ki-Jung/Jessica (So-dam Park), mother Chung-sook, and father Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song – Snowpiercer). The family is so poor that they have to use their very open bathroom hot spot as a place to steal free wi-fi from a nearby coffee shop, together fold pizza boxes for a delivery company to have enough money to buy food and leave their windows open when the streets are receiving a cleaning to get free fumigation from the bugs that fill their below the ground-level home. Saying that the Kim family needs a break would be an understatement. They receive their break when Ki-woo/Kevin is recommended as a fill-in tutor by his friend Min. Min is in a local college, tutoring a high school sophomore in English as a side job. Min is in love with Da-hye Park (Jung Ziso). He has plans to formally ask her out when she graduates and enrolls in a college herself. But he doesn’t trust any of his college buddies to tutor his love interest and thus enlists the help of his childhood friend Ki-woo (who, at this point going forward, I will refer to as Kevin) to be the man he can trust around Da-hye.
We learn a lot about the Park family early on. Da-hye is indeed beautiful and bound for success when she graduates high school. Her father, Dong-ik (Sun-kyun Lee), is a very successful businessman, a loving father to Da-hye, and her elementary school-aged brother Da-Song and a faithful husband to Yeon-kyo (Yeo-jeong Jo). Yeon-kyo is a wonderful mother, but we learn from Min that she is rather dim-witted/gullible. And herein lies our story. It’s hard to write a lot without giving too much away.
However, like his previous success, Snowpiercer, Parasite is a movie that is less about the backdrop or characters. It is more about social classes/hierarchy without blatantly ever stating it (you can’t help but see it). First, the Park family is so well off that they have to rearrange their expensive cars in their garage. Then you have the Kim family, which relies solely on public transportation when they have a few bucks in their pocket or the soles of their shows when they do not. Kevin takes the small fact about Yeon-kyo’s innocence and deceivability into getting his entire family to work for the Parks. He convinces her that Da-Song is an aspiring artist who could use the help of an art therapist/tutor in the form of his sister, Jessica. Jessica uses a conniving trick to get the Park’s family driver fired so her father can be the new driver. The family then uses another trick to get Chung-sook as the new housekeeper. During all this, the Kim family convinces the Park family that the four of them have never met. It is quite a trip.
To say this movie is a comedy would give a new definition to the word. Yes, it is humorous, and you likely will laugh, but your laughs will be nervous and uncomfortable, almost like you shouldn’t be laughing. You know that this movie isn’t set out to be a comedy, and you know something is coming. You just don’t know what it is. And that’s what makes Joon Ho’s film so brilliant, fascinating, incomparable, and original. It’s also what could earn it an Academy Award for Best Picture this year. A Quiet Place could have earned a nomination, and Get Out DID earn a nomination in this category. It takes a 90-degree angle a little over halfway through its 132-minute run-time without blinking. It invests the first hour and fifteen minutes to develop all of these unique characters to genuinely have a rooting interest in all of them.>Then, some weird stuff begins to happen, and people get hurt, and we still really don’t have an antagonist. We like each character individually, and the ones who start doing some bad things are the ones we know and like the most. It is storytelling and directing at its very best. It’s not perfect. I’ve included two scenes after the scoring of this movie, which didn’t work for me. But aside from those, we had craftsman character development and storytelling through this dark and chilling corridor that, ironically, was able to produce just as many laughs as it was jolting.
The acting was above average. I did not know any of these actors going into the movie and am uncertain how many speak English. I believe each actor in this film is of Korean descent and does their acting in South Korea. The dynamics between the top ten characters were a perfect blend of authenticity, wit, and deceit. The screenplay was both smart and taut. This movie was a flat-out win for audiences and critics alike.
Plot 10/10
Character Development 10/10
Character Chemistry 8.5/10
Acting 9/10
Screenplay 9.5/10
Directing 9.5/10
Cinematography 9.5/10
Sound 7.5/10 (a killer score like A Quiet Place or Get Out would have gone a long way)
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
93.5%
A-
The scenes I struggled with included when Kevin and Da-hye were kissing on just their second visit. It was too soon and didn’t fit what we knew about Kevin and what we could have perceived about Da-hye after Min described her. I don’t believe Kevin would have made such an advance and risked his new job on a girl who clearly could have been in love with Min as he was with her. There was so much on the line, and it was too early in Kevin and Da-hye’s story to work. The second scene was the bludgeoning of Kevin with the rock by Moon-gwang. There was far too much blood to suggest that Kevin could have survived this, not to mention the dropping of the stone on his head for good measure. I think the rock could have certainly been used to knock him out but to believe he didn’t die from the amount of blood we saw gushing from his skull alone was a little far out of reach.
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