Parasite

PARASITE   ***

Bong Joon-ho

2019

IDEA:  Desperate for money, the poor Kim family deceives its way into getting jobs with the upper-class Parks.

BLURB:  Parasite is an energetic, audacious, unwieldy work of social satire that boldly, if not always cohesively, marries genre thrills with capitalist critique. As he has done before, Bong here chews into society’s systemic, seemingly irreconcilable class divisions with a nervy relish, turning the frictions that arise from economic disparity into the engine for an increasingly macabre spectacle. His build-up, in which each member of the indigent Kim family finds employment with the affluent Parks through a chain of bogus referrals, is wonderfully funny and punchy in execution, and gives the title of the film its initial, explicit connotation. Yet we know it can’t be this easy; the cards are going to have to collapse eventually. And when they do, in an acutely chilling reveal, Bong introduces compelling new narrative and thematic dimensions that both productively complicate and muddy his message. It is here when the immorality and ill effects of the Kims’ scheme take hold in an unexpected way, and when Parasite shifts from a mostly straightforward tale of class envy and guile to a woolly one about intra-class warfare. The meaning of the title becomes unstable as Bong shows the withering of the Kims and the other dispossessed, whose inabilities to transcend the literally subterranean are understood partly as byproducts of a system that lives by keeping them subdued, but also, dubiously, as the result of poor judgment. This critique gets more muddled in Bong’s penchant for flashy, churning dramatic machinations, which can reduce nuance in favor of sensational outcomes, and yield scenarios that are too divorced from existing social conditions to make much real-world sense. But as a broadly thrilling, twisty, and finally cynical commentary about impossible upward mobility, Parasite leaves a mark.