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’s a comedy about competence. They’re 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 isn’t 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. That’s 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’s become a river, for a very long stretch of screen time, arriving at a semi-basement filling with sewage. It’s the single best piece of visual argument in the film and it contains almost no dialogue.
The bunker completes it. There’s 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. The film builds that idea as an actual room and lets you walk down into it without a word of explanation, and I think the moment the basement door opens is the best-staged reveal of Bong’s career.
Bong had the house built as a set, in full, to control the sightlines. The living room window frames the garden like a painting. That’s what it’s 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 state 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’ve probably skipped the stage where you looked for the physical arrangement that could have shown 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’s 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’s no such line to remove. If deleting one speech from your book would take the theme with it, assertion is carrying the theme, and assertion is the weakest way to carry anything.
The Smell
The one thing the Kims can’t 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’s the only marker that can’t 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 can’t 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’s worse than any insult delivered to your face.
That’s the film’s method throughout. The Parks are never cruel on purpose. They’re polite, generous, and entirely unable to conceive of the people working for them as having interior lives. Nobody is villainous. Everybody is comfortable.
What triggers the violence is the gesture at the party, Mr Park recoiling from the smell of a dying man, after exploitation, wages and months of deception have all passed without a spark. I find that small pulled face more frightening than any villain the film could have written.
Bong has said the smell was in the script from the beginning as the thing that couldn’t be crossed, and it’s the sharpest idea in a film full of them.
Find the detail your character can’t 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. That’s 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 can’t see.
The construction problem is that the constraint has to be both undeniable and invisible to its owner. That’s a narrow target. Money is deniable. Accent can be trained. A smell nobody can detect on themselves can’t be addressed. That’s 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’s 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 doesn’t signal. The score stays in the same tone, 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 storm is where I’d send anyone who thinks this is a film about a twist. Watching the Parks settle in for a pleasant evening while the Kims’ home fills with sewage is the angriest thing in the picture, and Bong gets it done with a weather report and two very different staircases.
The party sequence that follows is staged in bright sunshine on a lawn. That’s 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’ll 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 doesn’t shift. Change the events and hold the tone, and the reader will follow you anywhere. Change the tone to announce that things are now serious and you’ve told the reader how to feel.
That’s 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 tone exactly where they were, and change only what happens. Readers detect tonal preparation instantly and take it as reassurance, because a book that announces its own darkening has told you it’s in control.
If you want to test whether you’ve 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’ve written a signal, and the signal is doing what 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. It’s the obvious reading. The Parks can’t function without staff: they can’t 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’s a conflict. That’s the sharpest thing in the film and the reason it’s not a simple parable. The people at the bottom are competing for a small number of places, and the competition 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’re standing. The father’s decision at the party is the only unmotivated act in the film, and I think that’s deliberate. Something breaks and even he can’t 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’s interesting commercially is that it wasn’t a difficult film. It made over two hundred and fifty million dollars, it’s funny, it’s 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’s 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. That tells you how much the film depends on composition instead of color.
Should you watch Parasite?
Yes, and don’t read about it first. The midpoint works once at full strength, and the pleasure of not knowing what kind of film you’re watching is the thing most worth protecting.
It’s a 9 because Bong’s control of tone is the best I’ve seen from anyone working now, and the only thing I’d trim is that final coda, which reaches for something the film had already earned. It’s also funny and fast, and far more entertaining than its prize-winner reputation suggests.
