Fiercely Original

Rating: 9/10 (23 October 2019)

One of the things I liked about the film "12 Years a Slave" was that it punctured the idea of the "happy slave." Some slaves had the luck to experience better living conditions than others, but none of them was ever allowed to forget that they were property. If they had a "nice" master, they might smile and exchange pleasantries, but the seething resentment of having a master in the first place never went away.
A variation on the "happy slave" concept still exists in the world of today, I think, but it's been transferred to the serving class. There's this pervasive notion that those who struggle economically are happy just to be employed by those who have more. Maids, nannies, chauffeurs, doormen -- what do they exist for but to make life more convenient for the wealthy, and as long as they're well treated and paid for their efforts, what do they have to complain about?
This dynamic is explored explosively in "Parasite." It's almost impossible to talk about the film without revealing its secrets, and this is one film that works best the less you know about it. It's funny, scary, suspenseful, sad, sometimes all at the same time. It's playful, yet serious. Director Bong Joon Ho clearly has a ball playing with genres and constantly upending our expectations. The fun of this movie is never knowing where it's going to go next. It creates a metaphor for the increasing divide between the haves and have nots in Korea specifically but the world in general by presenting us with a filthy rich family that remains blithely unaware of those who, in their eyes, exist to do things for them, even when those people are (literally) right under their feet. There aren't good guys or bad guys, heroes or villains. At times you despise everyone in the movie, at other times you feel compassion for almost all of them. It's a movie that is many things at once and refuses to be categorized, and as a result it looks much like our modern world.
Grade: A