Parasite Exposes the Real Suckers in a Class-Conscious Thriller

 
Caution: This review contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Parasite

Parasite wears its themes on its sleeve. Director Bong Joon-ho chronicles the divide between rich and poor, between the class that has to scrape and scrap to make ends meet and the one that lives in careless largesse. He makes the gulf between them massive and eventually deadly. Within the confines of his feature, the wealthy enjoy the privilege of remaining oblivious to that divide and its attendant struggles, while the underclass must fake and fink and fight one another for a small cut of what their social superiors thoughtlessly squander.

Those ideas give ballast to an amusing, twisty, thriller of a film. Separate and apart from the class-conscious themes, Parasite captivates its audience with the premise of one poor, desperate family ingratiating and insinuating themselves into the lives of a wealthy, complacent one. Joon-Ho crafts his tension in how far the Kim family could take this ruse and how long they’ll be able to make it last, before everything comes tumbling down.

From there, Parasite steadily escalates, reaching stranger and more dangerous places as the film wears on. The movie initially concerns itself with the engrossing but less outrageous story of the Kims slowly but surely pulling themselves out of their meager existence, and the entertaining craft of their scheme to gradually infiltrate the Park family’s lives. But the reveal of a hidden bunker underneath the Parks’ home, where a former housekeeper hid her loan shark-dodging husband, immediately ups the stakes.

Afterwards, Parasite’s ambit grows more and more outsized. The Kims face physical confrontations and mutual blackmail sessions. A bizarre episode of Frasier breaks out as the family tries to hide their indulgences in their hosts’ lavish excess, their bloody handiwork, and even themselves when the Parks unexpectedly return home. An impromptu garden party becomes a scene of intra- and inter-class warfare, as combatants for the chance to live off the wealthy’s spare change square off. And the slights of masters who treat their employees like appliances and class signifiers like personal scents accumulate into a bloody end.

"Still not the worst children's birthday party I've been to."

It’s all dark and funny and potent. The violence of the film has power because it’s muted and held back until the final reel. Joon-ho spends the bulk of his movie’s runtime letting the tension ratchet up and allowing the audience to wonder how long the Kims will let their scams play out. He raises the questions of whether they’ll be able to subdue their competitors, if they’ll evade detection from their benefactors, and when all this sneaking around and resentment will inevitably boil over.

So when it does, it hits all the harder. When the Kims’ rivals break free and a final insult becomes too much to bear, the contrast between the polite deference and the angry blade, between a sharp young man doing whatever it takes to climb the ladder and a deranged basement dweller bent on vengeance, arrives as a particular shock to the system.

That choice works beautifully in a film of contrasts. Joon-ho and company depict the Kims living in a semi-basement apartment, riddled with “stink bugs” and pestered by random, urinating passersby. He depicts the Parks’ housekeeper and her husband as carving out a rough-hewn existence without light or air underneath their floorboards. And he depicts the Park household itself as one of wide-open spaces, abundant food, and the fresh air and sunshine their less affluent counterparts yearn for.

The destitute in Parasite are depicted as literally below those of a higher station. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo and his team communicate this idea with how they shoot the film, presenting impossibly vivid shades of green and brighter than bright sunshine to color the world of the Parks, juxtaposed with the grungy browns and grays that permeate the Kims’ meager environs.

The American Plumbing Association recommends a distance of three feet between electronics and all bathroom fixtures to deter occupational hazards.

The film wraps itself around the irony of that. The key moment in the film comes when a deluge wrecks one family’s life while merely creating a minor inconvenience for another’s. The ensuing rain floods the Kims’ home, destroying their possessions and forcing them to sleep in a gym, packing away the last few signs that the family patriarch used to be somebody.

All the while, the Parks don’t even comprehend the severity of what took place. Their son pretends to be out in the elements, playacting as a Native American who has to brave the raw weather on his own just for fun. His parents get off on roleplaying what it would be like to inhabit the lives of the people they thoughtlessly fire and disdain. The family smiles about the lack of pollution the rain spurred and summon their servants for a frolic in its aftermath, safe from the sort of blowback or life-changing consequences this disaster forced their faux-familial assistants to contend with.

The old saying goes that it rains on the just and unjust alike. But in Parasite, who bears the brunt of that downpour, and who gets to remain blissfully ignorant of its hardships in light of the financial wherewithal to render it a mere inconvenience, makes all the difference in the world.

There’s supreme, if not exactly subtle, commentary in that. Some of “the help” downright worship the wealthy family whose “grace” allows them to subsist on the margins of their luxury. The need to survive pits the members of the underclass against one another, ready to con and challenge and even kill to protect their small piece of the pie while their blasé benefactors live in unquestioned plenty. It turns people with talents — in language, in art, in sport — into those who strive only for that brand of comfort and security, and the money necessary to attain it. That quest flattens us, changes us, and debases us.

"Let's find a rock, I mean a big ass rock..."

It’s a cheesy thing to say, but Joon-hoo uses his film to ask who the real parasites are. At the beginning of the film, the Kims complain about the bugs infesting their tiny home. Those insects are signifiers for how the upper class views the inhabitants of these places as sponging off the successes of those on higher rungs.

But by the end, the tables have turned. The same type of insect hovers around the dead body of the Park family patriarch. The imagery tells the audience that this man and his socialite confederates are the ones unjustly siphoning off the labor, the talents, and the lives of so many others who don’t have a fraction of what he and his family and friends take for granted.

It’s a reality that the Parks can remain willfully blind to, until the panic within their perfectly manicured garden exposes the ghosts kept outside and below, there to extract their bloody vengeance. Parasite spins an engrossing, comedic, and suspenseful yarn separate and apart from such barely-submerged subtext. But the combination of story and theme gives the film a weight behind its thrills, a knowing glance behind its laughs, and a darkness beneath its bright images of success, punctured by those kept from its fruits and denied their necessities.