A devilishly delicious and twisted tale of class dynamics

Rating: 10/10 (25 October 2019)

After hearing so praise much about Bong Joon-ho's latest film when it premiered at the Cannes film festival this year, I went in not trying to know too much about it. And it definitely lived up to the hype.
The Kim family struggles to get by as the father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), is unemployed and are forced to live in run-down basement apartment in an already poor neighbourhood. Conning and manipulation is second nature to the family as it is their only means to ensure they come close to living. And once the opportunity comes in the form of the wealthy Park family needing a new English teacher for their teenage daughter, the Kim's young adult son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) takes the position to help his family get the money they need to escape their impoverished lifestyle. Through a series of planned and highly calculated manipulation and trickery, Ki-woo gets all of his family members employed but at the expense of getting the Park's previous driver and housemaid fired to steal their paid positions. Eventually the Kim's start living off the of the Parks's luxuries as if they entered the gates of heaven and awarded for their scheme.
To explain anything more would ruin the rest of the story. The joy of it will be watching the twists unfold as the ideas and themes of Parasite take on a very unique and unexpected look at the class dynamic. The film portrays neither families as the hero or villain of this story. Similar to his English-language sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho dives deep into a surreal, abstract world to explore the class dynamic between the wealthy and the poor. The difference in this being neither side is worth rooting for nor against. The Kim's take advantage of the Parks's naivety through their con as the most sure-fire way to gain the benefits that are denied to them because of their class status. And so it means they are ignorant to the moral consequences made by their scam until it is too late. Meanwhile, the Parks are so condition to their wealthy and privileged lifestyle they are oblivious to how unfair they treat the lower class while being paranoid and frightened by what doesn't meet their high expectations. The cruel unexpected circumstances of the film's events prove no matter how well planned things go, the poor will still in the end be feeding off the scraps of the rich that blindly ignore them.
Don't want to say anything much else about Parasite other then it is worth seeing without not much else about it. Go see it.