Perfectly Done Political Satire

Rating: 10/10 (1 August 2019)

PARASITE: The new Bong Joon-ho film that may be the best he's made and a hopeful contender for the best of the year.
First of, the dialogue is brilliant. With it constantly working on multiple levels, first making you understand and care about these characters, then learning dribs and drabs of their schemes and finally subtly setting up dialogue which is then brilliantly reincorporated to fuel emotional powerhouses of performances within the explosive finale. This is all whilst it being incredible natural and just out right human, there are so many instances of character inflection which tell you so much about each and every person on screen. Especially when some of the characters later in the film are playing characters themselves, lines here and there are clearly said by either themselves or the character they're pretending to be and because of their fantastic set-up, you're able to immediately tell when they're being themselves or not on the turn of a dime.
It manages to always perfectly balance it's comedic elements with the serious mystery thriller ones, always knowing exactly when and how to incorporate the two into the lives of the characters to create an amount of emotional connectivity to a film I haven't experience all year.
The political satire and themes on class struggle are too, fascinating, they're intrinsically baked into the narrative and backstory of the characters without ever being in your face or obnoxiously telling you what to think, so when they are brought up for a narrative beat or for you to get an emotional read on someone, you're free to interpret and analyse them as much or as little as you want.
Joon-Ho has at some points made the political ideologies a bit too apparent in his films which has come across as almost lecturous in Okja (2017) and Snowpiercer (2013). Thankfully this has never been detrimental to the final product, but I think the political statements within Parasite are here to create a better emotional connection to these characters, rather than blatantly tell you about the political climate you already know about.
By making you care about all these different and unique characters and using the political themes to set the stage for the story, when the themes on class struggle come to a head within the narrative you for one actually care about them because they're affecting character's you understand and like, and secondly they're then far more interesting to delve into and think about because the film never asked you too.
Even if you were to purely watch this without wanting to think about social satire, it's still an unbelievable film. It takes you on a mysterious thrill ride with some of the most interesting and unique characters put to screen this decade, the story goes to places you would never dream it would, and the soundtrack will be stuck in your head for days after you see it. It's a mile a minute masterpiece from one of the most exceptional auteur directors working today and was more than worthy of taking the Palme d'Or - 10/10