Winner of the highest award the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, Parasite is a brilliant dark satirical drama that reaches the heights of filmmaking as a result of the truly extraordinary craft of the Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho who is already critically acclaimed for 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja. The film follows a poor working-class family living in a decrepit basement apartment in South Korea who are unable to find work, but, eventually, come up with a fraudulent plan to get themselves all employed at the residence of the wealthy Park family. The son decides to pretend to be a English tutor after his friend must take a leave from the job tutoring the high school daughter of the Parks. After his plan works, his family devises a plan to trick the extremely gullible mother of the extremely wealthy family to hire his sister as an art tutor, his father as a driver, and his mother as the housekeeper. In rather absurd fashion, all of the previous employees need to be replaced as a result of the lower class family’s shenanigans. Everything goes according to plan for a majority of the film until a rather shocking twist takes place in which the conniving family is put in jeopardy and could be caught by the Park family. The true artistry of the film is the filmmaker’s effective ability to mix satire and the twisted dark parts of the movie with the very dramatic and tragic elements of what impoverished families must struggle with on a daily basis. Overall, the movie is a cinematic masterpiece that takes a scalpel to better understand the deep wound of income inequalities that take place even in today’s modern society and does so by presenting a highly entertaining story that is both darkly humorous and painfully sad. Even if you do not usually enjoy subtitled foreign language films, I would still highly recommended seeing this movie for its mesmerizing use of cinema to tell a truly important story.
KEITH on Reels 