Parasite
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
Produced by Kwak Sin-ae, Moon Yang-kwon, Bong Joon-ho, Jang Young-hwan
Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won
Story by Bong Joon-ho
Starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Lee Jung-eun, Chang Hyae-jin
I like South Korean drama. Last year I encountered Kingdom a period drama/zombie series that combined the very best of both genres. Imagine Shawn of the Dead directed by Kurosawa, and you won’t come anywhere close, but it makes for a good sense of Kingdom nonetheless. Jägrmonsters will be pleased to learn there are niizze hats, too.
And I like Bong Joon-ho’s work. He did Snowpiercer, a post-apocalyptic drama about a cloistered society existing on a train that runs endlessly through snowy mountains. It’s both strange and utterly compelling, a masterwork.
Parasite combines a wry and subtle humor found in Korean drama with the class-struggle aspects of Bong’s work. The combination is irresistible.
In Parasite, a working poor family has a gift gig fall into the lap of the eldest son: tutoring the dim but pretty high school daughter of a wealthy family, similarly dim and naive, in English. To do so, he has to pose as a university student. The pay is very good, and the family is very gullible.
In short order, he has sabotaged the careers of other servants in the household and arranged to have them replaced by members of his own family, all posing as unrelated experts in various fields. His sister becomes an art tutor to a young son, the father a chauffeur, and the mother a maid/cook/everthing else. The ruses used to set all this up are nasty and ingenious.
It’s not a tenable situation, and it comes apart spectacularly and totally unexpectedly, turning dark and bloody and falling-down funny. The Oscars are tonight, and it’s favored to win. It should. It’s a fun movie, with a solid ensemble cast, artfully directed.
Bong is reportedly making a series based on Parasite for HBO.
Now on Netflix.