Parasite (2019)

South Korean director and screenwriter Bong Joon Ho has had a pretty good year, not only winning the big prize at Cannes last spring for this movie but also handfuls of film festival, Golden Globe, and Oscars accolades, including prizes for Best Director and Best Picture. I've been aware of Joon Ho since approximately 2006's The Host, which sets the tone for much of his work, half of an excellent monster movie jammed up with half of a repellent dysfunctional family story, a lot of it taking place in dark wet enclosed spaces. I thought The Host was overrated but the monster scenes (just barely) made it worth the stop. In fact, I don't think it was until 2013's Snowpiercer, his best before Parasite, that I started to take more of an active interest in him. Joon Ho's Mother, for example, from 2009, was overshadowed the next year by another movie by another South Korean director, Chang-dong Lee's Poetry, both having many similar maternal themes. Poetry is better than Mother. Even Joon Ho's last, Okja, I thought came with too many flaws of social critique a little too obvious and casting a little too glamorous (Jake Gyllenhaal and Tilda Swinton both deserve extended timeouts to think about their sins in it). This might be the place to make a dumb joke about Joon Ho's name, because in many ways his ideas seem to be products of hotbox sessions. Parasite, paradoxically, hits a sweet spot where his major themes—that is, disaster movies infected by family dramas—come together in a way almost impossibly gratifying. I take Parasite first as a broad critique of capitalism (complete with climate change disaster) but its biologically oriented title suggests even more profound places where Joon Ho is able to carry his narrative. The Kim family are urban working class and suffering all the pains of it—unemployed, impoverished, barely surviving on their obviously impressive wits. The patriarch (Kang-ho Song, a long-time Joon Ho player) is a driver and past owner of failed businesses. Mother (Hye-jin Jang) is a slattern. Son (Woo-sik Choi) is a dropout. Daughter and older sister (So-dam Park) turns out to be the brains of the bunch. After the son lands a job with a wealthy family, the rest of the poor family starts to move in on them, in various roles. The daughter sells herself as an art therapist for the rich family's ostensibly troubled boy (who has what might be an unnatural fascination with American Indians but more likely he's just a rowdy boy). The father gets the job of driving the rich family's limo. And the mother becomes the housekeeper. Things spiral out of control from there as they will in Joon Ho's tales, but the chaos that proceeds of family dysfunction caught up in brutal economic realities is more thoughtfully sculpted than usual this time. It's still chaos but with evident purpose beyond zany antics. The rich family is all fucked up too, of course—that family's matriarch is notably "simple," as the con artist family characterizes her, with Yeo-jeong Jo's performance really practically stealing the whole show. The point where the mansion turns out to have a hidden dungeon is the point where Joon Ho might often lose control of his material and he comes pretty close to it here again. But he holds on and you should too. It's a wild ride.