Par­a­site

It’s often said by peo­ple who don’t have a lot of mon­ey that mon­ey is the root of all evil. In actu­al­i­ty, the Bible verse (Tim­o­thy 6:10, if you were won­der­ing) is more spe­cif­ic: ​“The love of mon­ey is the root of all evil.”

South Kore­an writer/​director Bong Joon-ho cer­tain­ly seems to agree with this sen­ti­ment, as most of his films reck­on in some respect with ele­ments of cap­i­tal­ism and class war­fare. After two Eng­lish-lan­guage films (2013’s Snow­piercer and Okja),Bong has returned to his home­land for anoth­er para­ble about the seduc­tive nature of greed.

Par­a­site is a tricky, scary lit­tle beast of a film; it bur­rows under your skin and set­tles in for the long haul. On the sur­face it’s a black com­e­dy about fam­i­ly dynam­ics and the gig econ­o­my. When we first meet Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and his fam­i­ly, they’re scram­bling around their base­ment flat try­ing to leach some free wi-fi from the café next door in order to check their What­sApp mes­sages for poten­tial job offers.

They catch a break when a friend of Ki-woo’s puts him for­ward for a tutor­ing job with the wealthy Park fam­i­ly. But that’s only the begin­ning. Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), his wife Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) and their chil­dren, Ki-jung (Park So-dam) and Ki-woo are gold-stan­dard scam­mers, hatch­ing a plan to get their hands on a larg­er chunk of the Park family’s con­sid­er­able coin.

What unfolds is a tense, fun­ny, often bru­tal social satire, delv­ing into the absurd rit­u­als and anx­i­eties of the wealthy, as well as the way mon­ey has the pow­er to change every­one for the worse. It’s rare to see a film where pret­ty much every char­ac­ter is so glee­ful­ly unlike­able and so bril­liant­ly unhinged. While Hirokazu Koreeda’s Palme d’Or-winner Shoplifters gave us a sweet sto­ry of a Japan­ese fam­i­ly in pover­ty doing any­thing to sur­vive, in Par­a­site our strug­gling pro­tag­o­nists are cut­throat in their pur­suit of cash. They feel the world owes them some­thing, and won’t stop until they get it.

The tone is rem­i­nis­cent of the unflinch­ing­ly sin­is­ter, qua­si-sur­re­al Dog­tooth by Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos, and even boasts a cer­tain class-clash lit­er­ary pedi­gree, recall­ing the likes of Eve­lyn Waugh’s ​‘Vile Bod­ies’ and William Thackery’s ​‘Van­i­ty Fair’. Yet there’s a won­der­ful speci­fici­ty to Par­a­site which makes it such a cap­ti­vat­ing film: piv­ot­ing from hys­te­ria to grotesque on dime, it’s a blood­thirsty farce, yet even when the sto­ry can be applied to just about any cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety in the world, it serves as a reminder (in case you ever need­ed one) of how fear­less and inno­v­a­tive South Kore­an film­mak­ing con­tin­ues to be.

Bong is fierce­ly crit­i­cal of the mon­eyed class­es, who look down their nose at the poor (even not­ing that they have a dis­tinc­tive smell) and at times don’t even see them as human. When Ki-woo is employed, his new boss says, ​“let’s call you Kevin,” eras­ing his iden­ti­ty and cre­at­ing a new, West­ern­ised one that fits with her family’s image. It’s not exact­ly a stretch to say that Bong is a mas­ter of his craft, but with a film as tech­ni­cal­ly accom­plished and infi­nite­ly fas­ci­nat­ing as Par­a­site, he con­tin­ues to remind us just how damn good he is – and put all con­tem­po­rary West­ern social satire to shame.