The entire film world has been making the wave for South Korean Bong Joon Hos Parasit since the film snapped at the Gold Palm in Cannes last spring. Most people who saw it at the premiere agreed that it was an extremely strong competitor but at the same time - reasoned it - it was enough Parasite in the barrel that it on paper so much like 2018 winner, Hirokazu Koreeda's Shoplifters. Both are from East Asia, drama comedies and are about a poor family that takes the odd criminal grip to secure their survival.
It's true. At the same time, there are two works that approach the subject in completely different ways, which also reflects the filmic acquaintances of the two authors. Where Koreeda always stays close to the ground, the naturalistic (although Shoplifters is an unusually catchy thing), Bong Joon Ho usually delivers peculiar science fiction. Partly in Snowpiercer, which was a dystopian action, think Blade runner on a rushing train, and most recently Okja; a socially critical Save Willy.
But here we meet the Kim family, who live half a staircase down in a narrow apartment with windows out to the alley where packed people like to hit a drill. They are just above the rats on the social ladder but when the eldest son lurks in as a private teacher with the wealthy Park family, who live in the city's crowded neighborhoods, the situation begins to brighten.
Soon, all members of the family have managed to nestle into Park's luxury villa, as a driver, a house, and so on, and a brutal and mind-boggling power struggle begins that takes no prisoners.
Bong Joon Ho , just like in Okja and Snowpiercer, lets a social commentary pulsate under the baroque, here in the form of a class struggle - which one could see as an imaginative version of Ken Loach's Sorry we missed you. Both stories take off in realism where a poor family suffers a pinch in the hard materialistic contemporary, but only the former stays within the genre's raw labels. Bong Joon Ho and co-author Jin Won Han instead let their Parasite lift up and into the slightly surreal, and dare to mix moods in a way that was not thought possible in one movie. The parasite goes from slapstick to slaughterhouse, and back again, in no time - without scoring the least.
Or, well ... it is difficult in itself to get any real experience in any of the characters, but on the other hand, that is not the point. This is class struggle served as a raw beef. A stylized one, for like many other compatriots (not least Chan-wook Park), Bong Joon Ho depicts his gruesome violence in carefully thought out, aesthetically pleasing images.
In short, an uncompromising satire for a polarized contemporary, where the gaps between social parts grow and the mental cold inhibits empathy - which also begs the question of who are really parasites on the social body?
Maybe the expectations were too high (read: astronomical!) For those who just signed saw the movie half a year after the win in Cannes, but Parasite doesn't really look like the completely spotless triumph it has been reported on, but still it is the grave landmark, peculiar and uninterrupted entertainment. Which is more than good enough.