Movie Reaction: Parasite

Formula: The Secret of My Success / The Uninvited

I'm very pleased by the success that Parasite is having. Despite being a foreign film that's not even an action movie, it opened huge in limited release and keeps expanding to a wide release. It's a favorite to land many Oscar nominations and will surely top many year-end lists. I'm a defender of the American studio system, even still, as the mid-budget "movie for grown-ups" is disappearing and major studios are increasingly risk-averse. I think the current system still allows for more voices than even to be heard. But, American studios, even the small ones, still produce movies the follow the rules of American story-telling. It's refreshing to see a movie like Parasite that doesn't follow the same rules.

A lot about the story of Parasite has been kept a mystery, which is a little strange. It's not really a twisty movie. It takes a couple odd turns, but that has more to do with the style of it than anything surprising in the screenplay. Essentially, Parasite is a movie about a poor Korean family tricking a rich Korean family into hiring them all for jobs, and over time, the poor family becomes more aware of the rich family's ignorant resentment of the poor. This manifests in some really odd and extreme ways. What makes the movie wild has less to do with what those odd and extreme ways are than how they are packaged.

Most movies aren't very good at talking about wealth discrepancy. There's an understandable tendency to absolve the poor and villainize the rich. I'm bored of the evil businessman character because of how easy it is to write. Parasite is smarter about having this discussion. The members of the poor family aren't saints. They are scammers and their successes often require them to screw over someone innocent. The rich family's great sin is ignorance. They're actually nice people. They just have no consideration for those who are less fortunate. It's the idea, for example, that they don't have to be grateful to an employee for working on their day off because they are paying them overtime. As Don Draper would say, "That's what the money is for". I didn't feel bad that the rich family was getting conned. I also wasn't wishing harm upon them.

Parasite fell a little short of my expectations. Part of that is because my expectations had been built up unreasonably high. I had trouble getting used to the rhythms of the movie. It shifted from farce to drama to surreal awkwardly at times. Mostly, it stopped to underline its point a little too often. Director Bong Joon Ho isn't known for his soft touch though. That's what bothered me about both Snowpiercer and Okja. Parasite is far more restrained than either of those movies. Having actors working in his native tongue no doubt helped with that. I always got the feeling in Snowpiercer and Okja that the English-speaking actors tried to bridge the language-gap by overplaying everything. Except for those few points of tone management, I thought Parasite escalated spectacularly. The climax felt earned, and the ending is open to interpretation enough that I'll be thinking about it for a while.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend