Incredibly powerful and detailed.

Rating: 9/10 (21 February 2020)

Parasite was one of the best films of 2019. It engaged the audience by building tension slowly throughout the first half, then having everything come crashing down throughout the second half, as if in slow-motion. One of my favourite aspects of this was that, as Mr. Kim says in the latter half of the film, there was no plan to their actions. This way, the audience doesn't know what's happening until it's over, and that might suggest that the Kims don't either. Still, the rush that I felt when I figured out pieces of their plan is difficult to find in most films. Two examples of this are when Mr. Kim poured the hot sauce onto the tissue, to trick Mrs. Park into firing her housekeeper under suspicion of tuberculosis, or later in the film when they hide under the table from the Park family. I'm pretty sure I audibly gasped when Mr. Kim lifted up the tissue with 'blood' on it.
An important thing to note is that the film, though made in Korea, represents the futility of the American Dream in a way that I've never seen before. When I say 'American Dream', I mean the ideal that if you work hard enough, you can become rich and successful. Both the Kims and the Parks, I would say, are living in fantasy worlds of this ideal. The Parks believe that they've worked hard to get where they are, and therefore deserve household employees who don't smell like a basement. The Kims, on the other hand, hold the belief that working hard will someday get them where the Parks are, figuratively and literally. No one believes this more strongly than Ki-woo, the son of the Kim family. This is shown throughout the film, from even before he first gets the job as an English tutor, when he's trying to get a job with the pizza delivery driver. Once he gets the job, he believes it's his way out and he can save enough money for college. The worst part about this is that he still holds this belief at the very end of the movie, when he writes a letter (that he has absolutely no way to send) to his dad. The letter describes this exact ideal; if Ki-woo works hard and goes to university and makes money, he can buy the house his father is hiding in, and literally be where the Parks were at the start. Since he's already been rejected from college multiple times, and South Korean real estate is crazy expensive, it would be impossible for him to achieve this goal, but he still believes he can. This is, in my opinion, the saddest part of the movie. Since this is how it ends, it leaves the viewer contemplating whether he could actually achieve his dream of saving his father, which makes the film much more powerful.