Uproarious award-winner that will burrow under your skin
Even the grandest house is only as strong as its foundations – the unseen fingers reaching down into the rock beneath. Parasite, the unmissable new film from Bong Joon-ho, is a black satirical thriller about the tension between the superficial and the subterranean: the dark resistances and even darker pacts that keep society shored up. Although grounded very specially in present-day Seoul, it’s the kind of film that resonates anywhere – or at least, anywhere it’s possible to pass a larger, sleeker home than your own and find yourself mentally scurrying under the front door and imagining how life must be inside it.
Since it won the Palme d’or at Cannes last year, Parasite has been heaped with honours, including two
Baftas last weekend, and presumably at least one Oscar this coming Sunday night. And the praise is entirely deserved: it’s meticulously engineered, beautifully performed, and polished to an icy designer gleam. But it’s also uproarious, high-stakes fun – a perfect hybrid of whodunit, farce and bombrigged Rubik’s cube.
It centres on a sly but luckless working-class family, the Kims, whose city apartment is a basement-level hovel, and whose various lowly cash-inhand gigs barely sustain them from one meal to the next. But then good fortune strikes: their twentysomething son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is able to bag a job tutoring the teenage daughter of an IT mogul, Dong-ik Park (Lee Sunkyun), thanks to a friend who recommends him for the post.
The Park household is a preposterously chic modernist abode, presided over by Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), Dong-ik’s beautiful but ditsy trophy wife, who Ki-woo quickly surmises is ripe for the conning. The Parks also have a wildly overindulged younger son, who loves painting but hates sitting still. Wouldn’t he benefit from an art therapist? Yeon-kyo jumps on the suggestion. And Ki-woo, thinking of his aspiring-actress sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam), says he knows just the young woman for the job.
So begins a hilariously cunning and complex domestic heist, in which the Kims conspire to fleece the Parks for all they are worth. New job opportunities are created and existing employees prodded out of the nest, cuckoo-style – one is the Parks’ doting housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), whose unusual allergy leaves her open to a ruthless act of anaphylactic sabotage. Yet as the two families’ existences entwine, class envy flickers, and ignites a coal-seam fire of resentment that could explode at any moment.
There is a superbly underplayed scene in which the Kim family patriarch Ki-taek (superbly played by Song Kang-ho) realises the essentially low regard in which he’s held by the outwardly amicable Parks, and the look that spreads across his face is a perfect, silent haiku of class resentment.
What’s more, the Park household has secrets of its own – too shocking and amusing to so much as hint at here, but which develop the film’s core metaphor of class divisions in grimly uproarious ways. Once the Kims’ plan comes together, it collapses in style, yet Parasite’s grip on its point is so tight, you swear you can feel it tightening around your own neck. A high-speed hide-and-seek farce descends into horribly creative bloodshed, with the Parks’ home as a battleground we already know inside out.
A spectacular flash flood in the Kims’ grotty neighbourhood gives this otherwise interior piece the chance to stretch its limbs – yet it comes as no relief, and nor would you want it to. Constriction is part of the game here. Parasite burrows under your skin, and sinks in its teeth.
Parasite’s grip on its point is so tight, you swear you can feel it tightening around your own neck