Wow!

Rating: 8/10 (15 November 2019)

That was my reaction. Parasite starts as a sardonic black comedy about the relations between a poor family and a rich one in present day Seoul before veering off in an entirely unexpected, much darker, almost surreal direction.
The protagonists are the impoverished Kim family. Dad is a Micawber like optimistic fatalist, who has failed at numerous jobs but always expects something to turn up. Mom is solid and practical, a one-time high school track star, who keeps things together. The mid-20s daughter and college-age son are smart, quick, glib and nervy, willing to do whatever it takes, but they don't seem to have found their footing. They don't always agree, but they stick together.
The Kims live in a cramped, squalid basement apartment in the kind of neighborhood where drunks piss in the street. The scrape up a little money folding boxes for neighborhood pizzeria, none too competently. As we meet them, they have just lost free wi-fi because the neighbor upstairs has passworded her router. Dad advises the kids to hold their phones up and move around the apartment to see if they can catch a signal. They do, up on the ledge where the toilet sits. That's Dad's strategy for life in a nutshell.
Deliverance arrives in the form of Son's high school buddy Min, now in college. Min has a gig tutoring English to the 15 year old daughter of a very rich family. He's going to study abroad for a year, and he wants Son to hold his place till he gets back. Min intends to start dating the girl when she's old enough, and he figures Son will be a harmless substitute. Son did well on the English part of the college entrance exam, and Min assures him that he can bs his way through.
The rich family, named Park, live in a gorgeous, spacious modern mansion on a hill, formerly the home of a renowned modern architect who has since moved on to bigger things in Paris. The father is the kind of Korean global businessman who has been the subject of an admiring profile in the New York Times. Mrs. Park is described by Min as "slow," which isn't quite right. She's an oblivious but nice lady, more ornamental than useful, who depends on a middle aged housekeeper and who dotes on and spoils her hyperactive 8 year old son. You might call her street dumb. The same is true of her husband, who knows his way around business but is not as worldly wise as he thinks he is.
The Parks are insulated from the realities of everyday life by a thick cushion of money, and they think the world works the way it's supposed to. Park is always concerned that the family servants "don't cross the line" into familiarity. He and his wife assume that anything American is automatically first class and, to show their sophistication, they pepper their Korean conversation with scraps of English the way Miss Piggy uses French.
With the help of a diploma forged by Daughter Kim on Photoshop, Son aces his interview with Mrs. Park and gets hired to give English lessons 2 or 3 afternoons a week. In short order, he and the girl are also making out when Mom's back is turned. Son sees the boy's weird paintings pinned up on the fridge. He suggests to Mrs. Park that the boy could use art therapy and that he just happens to know an American trained art therapist. Mrs. Park swallows the bait, Daughter Kim bluffs her way through the interview with a combination of arrogance and art therapy buzz words she's picked up on the internet, and in short order she's having regular sessions with the little boy. Now that they're through the Parks' gate, the Kim kids manipulate things so that the chauffeur gets fired and is replaced by Dad, and the housekeeper gets fired and is replaced by Mom. They never let on that they're all related. The Parks don't have a clue. When the little boy notices that the new driver smells just like his art teacher, Mr. Park brushes it off because all the people who ride the subway smell the same."
At the halfway point, this has just been an amusing and quite enjoyable story of the clever, scrappy poor putting one over on the clueless, entitled rich. The Kims are making a very good living off the Parks and eating better than they have in a long time. Of course we know that the Kims will somehow screw up this honeypot and be threatened with discovery and disaster. Things do spiral out of control, but in a completely unexpected way. I can't say how without a major spoiler; let's just say that the Park mansion conceals some extraordinary secrets and that the injuries that the Kims have inflicted come back to haunt them. Their struggle to stave off detection starts as slapstick but gets more and more desperate, and it builds to a climax that you don't see coming but is completely foreshadowed and leaves you wrung out. Definitely worth it.
One sidelight for American viewers. Mr. Kim and one other character have each gone broke in the "Taiwanese Cake" business. I googled that. It turns out that there is a pattern in South Korean life of fads giving rise to a large number number of opportunistic but undercapitalized small businesses that fail when the fad runs its course. Taiwanese Cake was one of them, the equivalent of the US cupcake fad of 10 years ago.