Parasite: a poignant reflection upon inequality - and funny

Rating: 10/10 (1 February 2020)

This film - Parasite - is so good that I set up an IMDB account to write about it. The film is a reflection upon poverty and wealth, an issue that is visible and salient in South Korea where the film is set. It uses humour, likeable characters, and a mischievous pace to draw in the viewer. Like a frog in the proverbial slowly-heating pot, we unwittingly come to consider what it means to be poor, what it means to be rich, and the volatile interface between the two.
I began watching the film barracking for the various characters of the poverty-stricken Kim family as they weave themselves into the life of the wealthy Park family. The Kim family son, Ki-woo, pretends to be an English tutor to the Park family's daughter. In turn, Ki-woo draws in his sister, Ki-jung, who pretends to be an art therapist, to work with the traumatised Park family son. The mischief expands like a spider web, as the Kim family father, Ki-taek, and mother, Chung-sook, take further positions within the Park family as their driver and housekeeper. It's a simple premise taken to a ludicrous extreme, making the film both real and not-real.
Beneath the light-hearted tone in which the 'parasitic' enmeshment is established, a dark underbelly of resentment reveals itself as the poorer Kim family inhabits the life of the wealthy Park family. As their unlikely success grows, the Kim family shift from a mindset of sporadic life resignations towards the dangerous realm of possibility. The Kim family may actually find a way out of poverty by inhabiting of the Park family house. The second half of the film shifts gear to explore the violence and ruthless deception that is spawned within this up-close-and-personal straddling of absurd extremes of inequality.
Parasite calls on its viewers to understand the dynamics of inequality through this fable-istic account of two families, both having their own type of parasitic relation to each other. The Kim family is parasitic on the money of the Park family; the Park family, in turn, is parasitic on the Kim family to do life's chores. With great agility, the film sidesteps the temptation to valorise the poor or demonise the rich. We like all the characters, but there are no heroes. Instead, Parasite invites us to reflect upon inequality in its inglorious everyday forms. The Park family father doesn't like the smell of the Kim family father, while the Park family son inadvertently almost reveals the Kim family ruse by innocently noting that 'they all smell the same.' Poverty and wealth are not abstract categories; they are smells, experienced differently by rich and poor.
In this down-to-earth-ness, the filmmaker, Bong Joon-ho, explicitly calls on viewers to interpret the movie on different levels. From the opening scenes, the Kim family son, Ki-woon, repeats the word 'metaphorical.' He is ostensibly talking about a rock that is supposed to bring wealth, but we viewers are left to open up wider horizons of meanings, such as: societies of great inequality must inevitably devolve into transactional-parasitic relations; wealthy families in the midst of poverty must inevitably defend against the social incursions of poorer people doing what they can to survive, as well as defending against the psychological incursions of bad conscience. In every rich household there is something hidden in the basement, as least psychologically.
This film holds its line against the temptation to explicitly condemn the evils of inequality. Instead it relentlessly represents the dynamics of inequality, drawing away from the judgement of individual characters, leaving it to viewers to make sense of it. Being vague enough to not spoil the ending, the film's climax portrays violence bubbling up as an expression of long-suppressed resentment. It does so in light of a jarring juxtaposition between the despairing circumstances of the poorer family hitting rock bottom, and the oblivious self-centredness of the rich family who are circumstantially geared by the everyday realities of inequality to not want to know about anything outside their bubble.
If the film has a political point, it shifts the debate about inequality. Instead of talking about the 'deserving poor' or the 'greedy rich', the film describes the impoverished social ecosystem of unequal societies, and the social roles and habits these societies require of their people. Violence in the face of absurd levels of inequality does not come from character flaws. But, rather, it emerges as the breaking point of the logics and habits of inequality taken to their logical extreme.
An untended pot of boiling water creates scalding steam, and eventually bubbles over.