PARASITE

BLU-RAY

WINNER OF the Cannes Palme d’or and Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and International Feature, director, co-producer, and co-writer Bong Joon-ho’s classist farce, Parasite, focuses on the Kims, a family of poor but proud con artists. Presently scrabbling to get by on lowest-paid jobs in a bug-infested basement apartment in Seoul, South Korea, they dream of climbing up to a better life by tricking the rich using flattery, charm, and wellrehearsed scripts. After the son, Ki-woo, gets work as a home tutor based on Photoshop-forged university credentials and Googlesearched knowledge, they settle on the wealthy Park family. With a foot in the door, each member of the Kim clan can then infiltrate the household one-by-one. Ki-woo recommends a talented arttherapist colleague (his sister), followed—after first sabotaging the reputations of innocent staff— by a departed friend’s high-class chauffer (his father) and a supposedly excellent housekeeper (his mother). Parasite’s characters are all fairly despicable— either conniving, unscrupulous manipulators or snobby, bourgeois dupes. But there’s plenty enough dark humor and social commentary here to keep you grossed-out and engrossed.

Image focus is always narrow in the walled home occupied by the Parks, but relevant objects are kept sharp. Crisp lines in the modernist architecture, bright lighting, and highly reflective surfaces such as polished marble floors lend an antiseptic quality to the near-empty, well-groomed house and garden. Exceptional detail can be seen throughout and there’s good contrast, with rich blacks in the forbidding entrance to the cellars and bright whites in the fur of lap dogs. Colors are restrained and realistic, and skin tones look natural and display subtle gradations of hues. Only in scenes of nature— particularly during a nighttime flood in the depths of the city where the Kim family lives— do images reveal more complex compositions and dimensionality.

Surrounds are used aggressively to create convincing environments in a soundtrack filled with solo piano and powerful orchestral music. Effects such as a motorbike roaring by, or the voices of characters moving off-screen, are accurately placed and panned. Dialogue is full, and atmospheric sounds like a rustling breeze are conveyed with clarity. Deep bass adds heft to thunder during a storm, and to a giant door opening up to reveal secret underground chambers in the Park family’s house.

The disc’s only extra is a director Q&A, but it’s a substantive one that has Bong revealing some of his visual tricks.