‘Parasite’ Review: The Lower Depths Rise With a Vengeance

by Manhola Dargis, The New York Times Oct 10, 2019

Midway through the brilliant and deeply unsettling “Parasite,” a destitute man voices empathy for a
family that has shown him none. “They’re rich but still nice,” he says, aglow with good will. His wife has
her doubts. “They’re nice because they’re rich,” she counters. With their two adult children, they have
insinuated themselves into the lives of their pampered counterparts. It’s all going so very well until their
worlds spectacularly collide, erupting with annihilating force. Comedy turns to tragedy and smiles twist
into grimaces as the real world splatters across the manicured lawn.

The story takes place in South Korea but could easily unfold in Los Angeles or London. The director Bong
Joon Ho (“Okja”) creates specific spaces and faces — outer seamlessly meets inner here — that are in
service to universal ideas about human dignity, class, life itself. With its open plan and geometric shapes,
the modernist home that becomes the movie’s stage (and its house of horrors) looks as familiar as the
cover of a shelter magazine. It’s the kind of clean, bright space that once expressed faith and optimism
about the world but now whispers big-ticket taste and privilege.

“Space and light and order,” Le Corbusier said, are as necessary as “bread or a place to sleep.” That’s a
good way of telegraphing the larger catastrophe represented by the cramped, gloomy and altogether
disordered basement apartment where Kim Ki-taek (the great Song Kang Ho) benignly reigns. A
sedentary lump (he looks as if he’s taken root), Ki-taek doesn’t have a lot obviously going for him. But he
has a home and the affection of his wife and children, and together they squeeze out a meager living
assembling pizza boxes for a delivery company. They’re lousy at it, but that scarcely matters as much as
the petty humiliations that come with even the humblest job.

The Kims’ fortunes change after the son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik), lands a lucrative job as an English-
language tutor for the teenage daughter, Da-hye (Jung Ziso), of the wealthy Park family. The moment
that he walks up the quiet, eerily depopulated street looking for the Park house it’s obvious we’re not
idling in the lower depths anymore. Ki-woo crosses the threshold into another world, one of cultivated
sensitivities and warmly polished surfaces that are at once signifiers of bourgeois success and blunt
reproaches to his own family’s deprivation. For him, the house looks like a dream, one that his younger
sister and parents soon join by taking other jobs in the Park home.

Take being the operative word. The other Kims don’t secure their positions as art tutor, housekeeper
and chauffeur, they seize them, using lies and charm to get rid of the Parks’ other employees —
including a longtime housekeeper (a terrifically vivid Lee Jung Eun) — in a guerrilla incursion executed
with fawning smiles. The Parks make it easy (no background checks). Yet they’re not gullible, as Ki-taek
believes, but are instead defined by cultivated helplessness, the near-infantilization that money affords.
In outsourcing their lives, all the cooking and cleaning and caring for their children, the Parks are as
parasitical as their humorously opportunistic interlopers.

Bong’s command of the medium is thrilling. He likes to move the camera, sometimes just to nudge your
attention from where you think it should be, but always in concert with his restlessly inventive staging.
When, in an early scene, the Kims crowd their superior from the pizza company, their bodies nearly
spilling out of the frame, the image both underscores the family’s closeness and foreshadows their
collective assault on the Parks. Nothing if not a rigorous dialectician, Bong refuses to sentimentalize the
Kims’ togetherness or their poverty. But he does pointedly set it against the relative isolation of the
Parks, who don’t often share the same shot much less the same room.

Bong has some ideas in “Parasite,” but the movie’s greatness isn’t a matter of his apparent ethics or
ethos — he’s on the side of decency — but of how he delivers truths, often perversely and without an
iota of self-serving cant. (He likes to get under your skin, not wag his finger.) He accents the rude
comedy of the Kims’ struggle with slyness and precision timing, encouraging your laughter. When the
son and daughter can’t locate a Wi-Fi signal — the family has been tapping a neighbor’s — they find one
near the toilet (an apt tribute to the internet). And when a cloud of fumigation billows in from outside,
an excited Ki-taek insists on keeping the windows open to take advantage of the free insecticide. They
choke, you laugh. You also squirm.

The lightly comic tone continues after the Kims begin working for the Parks, despite ripples of unease
that develop into riptides. Some of this disquiet is expressed in the dialogue, including through the Kims’
performative subservience, with its studied courtesies and strategic hedging. (Bong shares script credit
with Han Jin Won.) The poor family quickly learns what the rich family wants to hear. For their part, Mr.
and Mrs. Park (Lee Sun Kyun and Cho Yeo Jeong) speak the language of brutal respectability each time
they ask for something (a meal, say) or deploy a metaphor, as when he gripes about people who “cross
the line” and smell like “old radishes.”

The turning point comes midway through when the Parks leave on a camping trip, packing up their
Range Rover, outdoor projector included. In their absence, the Kims bring out the booze, kick back and
take over the house, a break that’s cut short when the old housekeeper returns, bringing a surprise with
her. The slapstick becomes more violent, the stakes more naked, the laughs more terrifying and cruel.
By that point, you are as comfortably settled in as the Kims; the house is so very pleasant, after all. But
the cost of that comfort and those pretty rooms — and the eager acquiescence to the unfairness and
meanness they signify — comes at a terrible price.
Parasite Review

by John Nugent, Empire March 2, 2020

Parasite is a difficult film to talk about. It defies any easy pigeonhole, wriggles free from slotting into a
single genre, can be considered both a mainstream crowd-pleaser and an arthouse masterpiece — and
is, undeniably, a film best enjoyed going in blind, its delicious and shocking surprises ideally experienced
as innocently and obliviously as possible. So, finding words to describe it are hard. If there’s one word
that can best sum it up, it’s the director: Bong Joon Ho.

Parasite is pure Bong, which is to say that it is many things at once. From his 2000 debut, Barking Dogs
Never Bite, onwards, the Korean auteur has had an itchy, restless mind, never settling on tone or subject
matter, darting from horror to thriller to dystopian sci-fi to vegan monster movie — sometimes within
the same film — sucking up influences from both Hollywood (Spielberg, Hitchcock) and his native Korea
(Kim Ki-young, Lee Chang-dong) along the way. His hallmark is his multitudes.

This, his seventh film, is different again; after the futuristic stylings of Okja and Snowpiercer, Parasite
initially snaps into something resembling contemporary social realism. We meet the impoverished Kim
family — parents Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin), and their adult children Ki-
jung (So-dam Park) and Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) — living in a squalid semi-basement apartment. They
are unemployed and apparently unemployable. They steal whatever free Wi-Fi their cheap phones can
pick up, 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. But this is no Ken Loach tragedy. The Kims, we soon learn, are
quixotically ambitious and almost Machiavellian in their ingenuity. When an opportunity presents itself
for Ki-woo, the son, to engage in some light subterfuge by posing as an English-language teacher for the
teenage daughter of the wealthy Park family, they seize it. There seems to be no question among them:
the Kims are a united front from the start, and will embark in whatever professional bullshittery they
need to lift themselves up.

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; the aloof Park patriarch, Dong-ik (Lee Sun-
kyun), is head of some faceless IT company, while his stay-at-home wife Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) frets
about their troubled children alongside a permanent housekeeper (Lee Jung-eun). Their deeply
detached privilege ensures that the Kim family, one-by-one, manage to swindle their way into the family
home, without it ever seeming implausible.

And so the first hour of the film plays out like a conman caper, with all the pace and fizz of an Ocean’s
Eleven. There is a wicked joy to be had in watching the Kims’ ingenious scheme unfurl, piece by piece: a
carefully placed pair of knickers here, a scraping of peach skin there. The script, written by Bong 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 realise something has to go wrong. Where
will the conflict come from? Surely their elaborate gambit will be foiled? Bong’s masterstroke is to take
that tension and use it against us, to subvert our expectations wildly, to present unexpected challenges
to his characters and veer into different genres and tones, to turn the film into something different
entirely. Something that makes it, again, difficult to talk about without veering into spoilers.

What we can talk about is the astonishing craft on display here. This is a filmmaker who knows exactly
what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. His camera moves and glides with total assurance and conviction,
every pan and dolly deliberate. It is, among many achievements, a remarkably well-edited film, the
rhythms and pace guiding us through his chosen themes with such care that there is no mystery of its
intention.

It is, fundamentally, a film about the haves and have-nots. Sometimes the commentary is worn on its
sleeve: one character repeatedly notes how “metaphorical” things are, perhaps 
a self-mocking nod to
the director himself, who floods his films with meaning. Even that title is hugely instructive: the Kims, it’s
clear, are as parasitic as the stink bugs that infest their squalid home, leeching off the wealth of others
— but so, too, are the Parks, a family rendered infantile and helpless by their fortune, unable to
complete basic tasks without enlisting working-class servants to refine their lives.

Baked into this theme of inequality is the ambiguity of it all. There are no villains here. The rich Park
family are obnoxious, but ultimately nice — though, as the Kim matriarch notes with 
a poisonous
tone, “They’re nice because they’re rich.” The poor Kim family are liars, scoundrels, and criminals, if you
wanted to get technical about it — yet they’re essentially only conning their way into menial working-
class jobs. It’s not exactly the kind of take Danny Ocean would go for. They’re just doing what they can
to survive. If there’s a villain here, it’s capitalism, and the structures that force people into indignity,
desperation and naked self-interest. With a typical tonal rollercoaster, Bong gives the film an
extraordinary bittersweet ending, offering sun-dappled hope as quickly as it offers a tangy note of
downbeat, realist cynicism, and one that forces us to confront where we sit in the upstairs-downstairs
riddle.

But talk of capitalist allegories and social commentary should not detract from just how insanely
entertaining this film is. It is hard not to watch it rapt and gobsmacked, your jaw permanently near the
floor. The script was written for the theatre but the experience feels like it should only be had in a
packed cinema, where the crowd reactions will play as importantly 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 more up you didn’t know you
had. Frankly, it’s everything you want from a film. And it’s one you won’t be able to stop talking about.

A miracle of a film. It feels like Bong Joon-ho’s already extraordinary career has been building to this: a
riotous social satire that’s as gloriously entertaining as it is deeply sardonic.