Noted Korean director's enjoyable grifter family farce devolves into unfunny bloodbath

Rating: 6/10 (17 October 2019)

Bong Joon-Ho, the celebrated Korean director, actually won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Parasite. His "heroes" at the outset are the Kim family, semi-lovable con artists led by dad Kim Ki-taek, mom Choong-sook, son Ki-woo and daughter Ki-jeong. They live in a dirty semi-basement apartment in a lower middle-class part of town where they barely get by folding pizza boxes. The fun part is that the parents view themselves more as partners in crime with their kids and encourage them to engage in any kind of unsavory activity they can get involved in.

The inciting incident involves Ki-woo's friend Min-hyuk, who informs his buddy that he's going abroad and he'll gladly give Ki-woo his job as tutor to Da-hye, the daughter in the wealthy Park family, whose father is CEO for an extremely successful tech company, provided that he can convince the Parks to take him on.

The fun begins when Ki-yoo cons Mrs. Park into believing he has impressive academic credentials after forging diplomas using some computer software. Ki-yoo goes right to work seducing the impressionable teenager Da-hye and then convinces Mrs. Park to hire his sister Ki-jeong, as an art therapist for their young hyperactive son Da-song.

Before you know it, Ki-jeong (who calls herself "Jessica" in the Park household) plants her panties in the one of the family cars, leading to the firing of Mr. Park's driver, who's now suspected of having a clandestine affair with a girlfriend. Jessica now introduces "Uncle Kim" to Mr. Park as a new potential driver; the "uncle" is of course Jessica's dad and he's immediately hired by the unsuspecting father.

The family has one more hurdle before gaining apparent hegemony over the Parks. Housekeeper Moon-kwang, who has been a fixture there for ages, will not be so easy to get rid of...until it's discovered she's allergic to peaches. So when Jessica applies the smallest of tinctures from a peach brew, poor Moon-kwang is felled by her allergies. When "Uncle Kim" convinces Mrs. Park that Moon-kwang is suffering from tuberculosis, Mrs. Park has no choice to fire the hapless housekeeper.

Parasite takes a dark turn when Moon-kwang later returns to fetch some of her belongings and soon it's revealed that her husband Geun-sae, on the lam from loan sharks, has been hiding for the past four years in the basement where there's a secret bunker (the Park home is a veritable mansion with the secret bunker doubling as a fallout shelter originally designed for protection against North Korean missiles!).

When Moon-kwang discovers the new "hired help" are from the same family, she records footage on her cell phone proving that they're simply a bunch of grifters and threatens to send the clip to Mrs. Park. When the Parks suddenly return early from a camping trip, the Kims scramble to confine the housekeeper and her husband down in the bunker. Choon-sook ends up pushing Moon-kwang down the stairs after she tries to escape and hits her head, suffering a concussion.

As the noted drama critic Eric Bentley once noted, farce is "permitting the outrage without the consequences." The Kims and the Parks can do all these crazy things without any consequences since up until this point, the story is supposed to be a farce. But once Moon-kwang is pushed down the stairs and suffers a grievous head injury, Choon-sook is no longer an amusing character.

A series of events then take us further and further away from the amusing spectacle we were enjoying minutes before. The Kims (minus Choong-sook) manage to flee the mansion after the Parks return home, only to find their apartment flooded during a storm. They're forced to sleep in a gymnasium during the night. Moon-kwang then dies from the head injury. The next day, Mrs. Park throws a birthday party for Da-song and the three Kims return.

Parasite gets more bizarre and unpleasant when Ki-yoo, wielding a rock given to him as a gift by Min-hyuk, goes down in the bunker and attempts to kill Geun-sae, who ambushes and hits him in the head with the rock. The sight of the bleeding Ki-yoo will disappoint all those who were hoping the farcical goings-on will continue.

But it gets worse. Geun-sae goes berserk and stabs Ki-jeong to death, only to be stabbed and killed by Choong-sook with a meat cleaver. Mr. Park, desperately trying to retrieve the car keys so he can take Da-song to the hospital after the child has had a seizure, gets a whiff of the dying Geun-sae, whose smell repulses him (it's been revealed earlier that Park has a revulsion to the smell of certain lower middle-class people). When Ki-taek witnesses Park's reaction to the smell, he goes berserk and stabs Park to death.

Finally, we learn that Ki-yoo survives after undergoing brain surgery. He and his mom, Choong-sook, end up getting probation while Ki-taek takes refuge in the bunker where no one finds him. Ki-yoo fantasizes of the day he'll become rich, buy the now sold Park mansion and reunite with his dad.

Some have said this is some kind of meditation on the class differences in South Korean society. Those differences are highlighted comically through most of the film but with the ensuing bloodbath, the comic tone is lost. The principals all receive their comeuppance which is good I suppose, but without the playful tone established early on, Parasite ends up feeding on the viewer, whose initial high expectations are ultimately left unmet.