Parasite (2019) Review
9/10
A poor family works its way one by one into the employment of a rich one, and for an hour it is a comedy about competence. They are good at this. The forgeries are convincing, the improvisation is quick, and the film lets you enjoy watching people be capable.
Then the doorbell rings during a rainstorm, and the second half is not a twist so much as a floor giving way.
Bong Joon-ho had been working toward this for twenty years. Memories of Murder, The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja are all the same argument in different costumes, and this is the version where the metaphor and the plot are the same object.
The 9 is for control. Bong changes genre at the midpoint without changing his tone, his camera or his sympathies, which is the hardest transition available and almost always botched. The architecture carries the theme so completely that no character ever has to state it. The one point I hold back is for a final sequence that reaches for a coda the film had already earned without it.
The House Is the Argument
Everything is vertical. The Kim family lives in a semi-basement where the window looks up at street level, at a gutter, at a drunk urinating. The Park house sits at the top of a hill behind a gate, and you approach it by climbing.
To move between the two you go up or down, and the camera simply obeys the geography. Nobody remarks on it.
The rainstorm sequence makes the axis explicit and brutal. The Kims descend from the Park house through the city, down steps, down more steps, down a street that has become a river, for a very long stretch of screen time, arriving at a semi-basement filling with sewage. It is the single best piece of visual argument in the film and it contains almost no dialogue.
The bunker completes it. There is always a level below the one you thought was the bottom, occupied by somebody worse off, and the people above have no idea it exists. That is not a metaphor the film explains. It is a room.
Bong had the house built as a set, in full, to control the sightlines. The living room window frames the garden like a painting, which is what it is for. The Parks have bought a view.
The Kims’ window frames a wall and a gutter, and the film returns to both windows repeatedly without ever putting them in the same sentence.
Let the setting encode the argument so the dialogue never has to carry it. Bong never has a character explain the class structure because the audience has spent two hours climbing and descending it. If your theme is being spoken aloud by somebody in your book, you have probably skipped the stage where you looked for the physical arrangement that could have carried it instead. Find the staircase before you write the speech.
The working method is to design the space before you write the scenes, and to let the blocking do the argument. If your theme is hierarchy, build a place with levels. If it is exclusion, build one with a threshold. Then stage your ordinary scenes in that geography and the theme arrives without anybody mentioning it.
The test is whether you can remove your most thematic line of dialogue with no loss. In Parasite there is no such line to remove. If deleting one speech from your book would take the theme with it, the theme is being carried by assertion, and assertion is the weakest way to carry anything.
The Smell
The one thing the Kims cannot fake is how they smell, and the film returns to it with escalating consequence until it becomes the reason somebody dies.
It works because it is the only marker that cannot be bought, learned or performed. They acquire the vocabulary, the qualifications, the clothes and the manners. The smell of the semi-basement comes with them and they cannot detect it themselves, because you never can.
The son notices first, in the back of the car, and says so with a child’s directness. Then Mr Park says it to his wife in private, holding his nose while the Kims are hiding under the table, and the humiliation of hearing it is worse than any insult delivered to your face.
That is the film’s method throughout. The Parks are never cruel on purpose. They are polite, generous, and entirely unable to conceive of the people working for them as having interior lives. Nobody is villainous. Everybody is comfortable.
The gesture at the party, Mr Park recoiling from the smell of a dying man, is what triggers the violence. Not exploitation, not wages, not the deception. A face pulled at an odor.
Bong has said the smell was in the script from the beginning as the thing that could not be crossed, and it is the sharpest idea in a film full of them.
Find the detail your character cannot change and build the story on it. Class in fiction is usually written as money, accent or education, all of which are alterable with effort, which is why those stories tend toward the redemptive. Something involuntary and undetectable to its owner is a much harder and better constraint. Ask what your character carries that they cannot see.
The construction problem is that the constraint has to be both undeniable and invisible to its owner, which is a narrow target. Money is deniable. Accent can be trained. A smell nobody can detect on themselves cannot be addressed, which is why it escalates instead of resolving.
Look for the thing your character would fix if they could see it. Then let another character notice it, once, privately, and let your protagonist overhear. That single arrangement produces more humiliation than any confrontation, because there is nothing to argue with and no way to correct it.
The Genre Change
At the midpoint the film stops being a caper and becomes a thriller, then a tragedy. The former housekeeper returns during the storm, and everything after that doorbell belongs to a different picture.
Most films that attempt this lose the audience, because they signal the change with music or lighting or a shift in performance, and the audience feels handled.
Bong does not signal. The score stays in the same register, the camera keeps the same distance, the comedy keeps arriving, and the events change underneath. So the audience arrives somewhere terrible without noticing the road.
The storm is the hinge and the film makes the inequality of it explicit without commentary. For the Parks the rain is an inconvenience that cancels a camping trip and produces a nice evening at home. For the Kims it destroys everything they own. Same weather, and the film says nothing about the difference.
The party sequence that follows is staged in bright sunshine on a lawn, which is the only tonal choice Bong makes that could be called a signal, and it works in reverse. The most violent scene in the film happens at a children’s birthday party in daylight.
The plan the son narrates at the end, in which he will earn enough money to buy the house so his father can walk up out of the basement, is shot as though it might happen and is arithmetically impossible. Bong has confirmed this is the point.
A tonal shift works when the tone does not shift. Change the events and hold the register, and the reader will follow you anywhere. Change the register to announce that things are now serious and you have told the reader how to feel, which is the moment they stop feeling it. If you need a chapter to get darker, resist the urge to change the prose.
The discipline is mechanical and unglamorous: keep your sentence rhythms, your paragraph lengths and your comic register exactly where they were, and change only what happens. Readers detect tonal preparation instantly and it functions as reassurance, because a book that announces its own darkening has told you it is in control.
If you want to test whether you have done it, read the chapter before the turn and the chapter after it aloud. They should sound like the same writer in the same mood. If the second one has gone quiet and serious, you have written a signal, and the signal is doing the work your events should be doing.
Nobody Is the Parasite
The title invites you to decide who it applies to, and the film declines to help.
The Kims live off the Parks, which is the obvious reading. The Parks cannot function without staff: they cannot drive, cook, clean or raise their own children, and the film is precise about this. Neither family can survive the other’s absence.
The most uncomfortable material is between the two poor families. The Kims destroy the former housekeeper’s arrangement, and the two households fight each other viciously over a single position while the people upstairs remain unaware there is a conflict.
That is the sharpest thing in the film and the reason it is not a simple parable. The people at the bottom are not in solidarity. They are competing for a small number of places, and the competition is what keeps the arrangement stable.
Bong has said he wanted a film with no villains and no heroes, and the discipline holds. Everybody does something indefensible, and every indefensible act is comprehensible from where they are standing.
The father’s decision at the party is the only genuinely unmotivated act in the film, and I think that is deliberate. Something breaks and even he cannot say why.
What the Awards Meant
It won the Palme d’Or unanimously, then Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature, becoming the first film not in English to take the top award in ninety-two years of the Academy.
The line about the one-inch barrier of subtitles was delivered months before, at the Golden Globes, and it turned out to be the campaign’s entire argument.
What is interesting commercially is that it was not a difficult film. It made over two hundred and fifty million dollars, it is funny, it is fast, and it works as a thriller if you want nothing else from it. The idea that international cinema is a chore was never about the films.
It also arrived at the end of a decade in which inequality had become the default subject, and it is a considerably better film about it than most because it never argues. It arranges.
The black and white version Bong released afterward is worth seeing. It changes very little, which tells you how much the film is carried by composition instead of color.
Should you watch Parasite?
Yes, and do not read about it first. The midpoint works once at full strength and the pleasure of not knowing what kind of film you are watching is the thing most worth protecting. It is funny, fast and considerably more entertaining than its reputation as a serious prize-winner suggests.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 4 of my film lists