A clever, very modern tragicomedy.

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2019)

I'm not sure I would have seen this film without my wife's prodding, and it's partly because of the title. It's accurate enough to the storyline but as an English word it's a bit creepy in tone. I think it needed a somewhat different translation from the original Korean. But on to the film itself: obviously it's a labor of love for Bong Joon Ho, who's the writer, director, and producer. I didn't know any of the actors beforehand but they are all just fine, and they do a great job at making each one have distinct personalities among a fairly big cast of speaking roles. I also like that in our theater we got subtitles rather than some clumsy dubbing. (and the subtitles are the best and most accurate I've seen in recent times.)
For lack of a better term I would describe this as a tragicomedy. A slum-dwelling family of four in an unnamed Korean city live by their wits on odd jobs. Through a series clever little twists they find a way to gradually insinuate themselves into jobs as servants to a young rich suburbanite family who never suspect what they're getting. (The young family are indeed rich enough to pay a whole coterie of servants including a driver, tutor, housekeeper, and nanny, but they're not uber-rich like the Crazy Rich Asians -- they actually do work hard and have their own issues. Not knowing any better, I'll take it for granted that their ultra-modern Western-style home and garden are realistic depictions of that class.) For about the first half of the movie this plotline is played for a good deal of humor. But then through another series of twists this house of cards comes down and things go sideways , leading to a rather shocking final scene. Quite a lot hinges on the maybe-improbable presence of a hidden underground bunker and a key character introduced very late in the story (no spoilers). There turns out to be more than one "parasite" at work, and it's more than just the young rich folks who don't know what they are getting into.
It's a complex, multilayered story (2:12 run time) and the director throws quite a lot at us. But there are no wasted or unnecessary scenes. A prominent example is during a freak torrential rainstorm. The rich folks (on the high ground, as we notice for the first time) just sit inside their beautiful garden, while the poor slum dwellers cannot save their pathetic basement flat from being washed away (complete with raw sewage in the streets). It's excruciating to watch, and this is where the message hits home. Basically decent people are forced into doing things they shouldn't do by their own circumstances and there is in the end nothing they can do to escape. The message that class determines destiny was quite a bit more overt in Bong's previous effort Snowpiercer, but it's present here too throughout.
At the end, everyone is left damaged, but we're given a wistful little coda that holds out just a tiny ray of hope. That's only human.