One of the decade's most clever and original

Rating: 10/10 (6 December 2019)

South Korean film crews may be World Cinema's most painstakingly dedicated; the movies are detailed, powerfully acted, and creatively daring in ways that would be impermissible under Western studio supervision. As is the case with Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, they might also provide some of our time's most refreshingly, impressively original stories and supply timely commentary in the process.
We meet the impoverished Kim family, father Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), mother Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), and daughter Ki-jeong (Park So-dam), and we soon learn they aren't the most honest bunch. Ki-woo, through his friend Min-hyuk, gets hired as a homeschool English teacher, using forged Oxford documents, at the home of the upper-class Park family; tech company CEO Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun), his stressed-out wife Yeon-gyo (a wonderful Cho Yeo-jeong), teen daughter Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), and little Da-song (Jung Hyun-joon). This is but the beginning of the Kim family's sneaky ascent.
Learning of Da-song's troubles, Ki-woo, going by "Kevin", informs Mrs. Park of an art therapist he knows named "Veronica", who is actually Ki-jeong, who may help Da-song evolve. Through a series of events I won't spoil, "Veronica" later gets the chance to recommend a new chauffeur for the Park family in the form of Ki-taek, going by "Mr. Kim", who in turn recommends a new housekeeper, played by Chung-sook.
The way the Kims continually fool the Parks - from meticulous script recitations in their basement flat to ad-libbing based on research they've done for the fields they pretend to work in - is clever, tense, impossible to predict, and morbidly hilarious throughout. It is made even more amusing to behold thanks to how it's edited (for instance: cutting from Ki-taek lying to Yeon-gyo, to him finishing the same sentence during Ki-woo's rehearsals), how purposefully the staging and cinematography are done (the vast Park household juxtaposed against the cramped Kim residence), and how utterly believable these performances are.
The actors who portray the Kims, in particular, give remarkably layered performances. Each actor is required to play the character in their natural environment, plus the persona they assume when posing as the Park family's home employees.
The characters themselves are convincing actors, hence their successful duping of the Parks, which makes each actor's performance all the more considerable. And yes, it seems a bit unlikely that the Parks would fall for the scam and refrain from asking questions when each new employee of theirs happens to know someone suited for a very recently vacated position, but the film is self-aware and deliberate about this, not only because the Parks - in their carefree luxury - aren't the most observant.
This is all comical to experience, yes, but what Bong has to say about class inequity and - during the films bleaker, later scenes - how it isn't necessarily so simple as letting the poor "have some luxury" for the sake of fairness, is what makes Parasite stick. We may understand the downtrodden Kims (we learn from a revelation that their desperation is not unique), and laugh at their conniving schemes, but are they truly Sherwoodian heroes in the end?
Parasite is generally well-loved, but divisive in the circles you'd expect. My guilty-pleasure film critic Armond White is certain that the film scoffs at nuclear families (also calling it a "cancel-culture comedy" because, I guess, anti-family sentiments are common amongst those who also like to "cancel" offensive celebrities and, indeed, berate classism). So far as I can decipher, White's main evidence is the fact that, in the story, a traditional and successful family suffers comically at the hands of the semi-titular social parasites - who he likens to entitled, modern Communists and AntiFa terrorists.
As mentioned, the Kims aren't strictly heroes or justified. Isn't this a bit like saying Midsommar seeks to paint Swedish tradition as perverse because it has characters (read: villains) who co-opt our customs perversely? But then, psh, who'd reason like that?