Parasite Review

By Jack Cardwell

ITHINK THE THING THAT SPEAKS THE most about the quality of Parasite is how little you can tell someone about it without spoiling it. This phenomenon extends even to what genre Parasite fits into; I usually mutter something about it being a thriller, before making some vague hand gesture and telling whoever asked to go see it. And they should, because it’s creepy and uncomfortable and heartfelt in a way most movies fail to be. Obviously the credit for this goes to Bong Joon-Ho, who deservedly took home the award for Best Director among others at the Oscars. His sense for pacing and delivery is immense, but more impressive is the atmosphere he creates throughout, a type of je nes se quoi.

Parasite has a certain quality that’s difficult to describe but easy to notice and nearly impossible to capture. The rhythm stays consistent, but everything feels fresh and new; every scene a completely natural continuation of the last,but the movie never feels predictable. It’s present in all of his work save Snowpiercer, but Joon-Ho

kicks it up a notch here. Parasite is crisp, slick, and flows together impossibly well - it represents the height of Joon-Ho’s creative style, at least up until this point. Joon-Ho builds the movie around his strengths and talents as a director and completely circumvents his weaknesses, arguably his biggest being his penchant for writing incredibly goofy looking flying kicks in all of his movies with extended fighting sequences. There are no dropkicks to take you out of the experience here; Parasite sucks you in completely with its absorbing story and characters. In particular, I would point to Ki-Jeong/Jessica, played by Park So-Dam, who absolutely steals every scene she’s in and was robbed of an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Parasite’s themes aren’t particularly hard to decipher, but Joon-Ho doesn’t beat you over the head with them either. At its core, Parasite is a pretty obvious commentary on class conflict, but there’s still a lot to parse here. What does the stone represent, who was the Parasite, was it the poor

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family for lying for their own gain, was it the rich family for perpetuating and benefitting from a capitalist system that causes suffering for those less fortunate, or was it me for pirating the movie? Who’s to say really? In all seriousness, Parasite is the best kind of movie. It gets under your skin and buries itself in your mind, then scratches. You replay scenes in your head laying in bed at night. Film, as Danish director Lars Von Trier says, should be “like a rock in the shoe.” While it lacked some of the rawness of his earlier work, notably Memories of Murder, this was Bong Joon-Ho’s best movie so far. And while a film about class divide and out-of-touch rich people winning the highest award at an awards show where all individual nominees got gift bags valued at over 200 thousand dollars, which were assembled by a company that allegedly pays disabled workers as little as 13 cents an hour, might be a little on the nose, it’s hard to argue that Parasite deserved anything less than Best Picture.

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