![]() ![]() The Park child faints, and his parents demand the father, Ki-taek, drive them to the hospital, even as his own daughter is bleeding to death. During the festivities, Kun-sae, the mad, entrapped husband, emerges from the bunker and stabs Ki-jung, creating total pandemonium. In the final act, Bong carefully constructs the Parks’ carefree spontaneity onto the backs of the Kims. That is, until the Kims are asked to sacrifice a weekend off to throw a birthday party for the Parks’ baby boy. Temporarily the Kims win out, trapping Mun-kwang and her husband, Kun-sae, in the bunker. Instead, the two families fight for their place at the trough. How could the Kims even compare to this lowlife who has been subsisting off the runoff of a wealthy family? It’s quite cruel and sad, but I thought it was being real and honest with the audience. When Mun-kwang begs the Kim mother to allow her husband to continue hiding there, she calls Chung-sook “older sister” and says that they are both “neighbors in need.” Chung-sook huffily refuses both labels. The Kims are shocked by the state of his living conditions. The original housekeeper Mun-kwang (Lee Jeong-eun) returns and confesses that her husband, Kun-sae, has been stowed away in a secret bunker underneath the Park house for four years. A story about two homes - the upstairs family and the downstairs - reveals yet another lurking underneath. Then, as with so many of Bong’s films, there’s a moment about a third of the way through when the bottom drops out and Parasite morphs into something else. In the age of extreme wealth disparity, the Kims’ striving and scheming is thoroughly relatable: After all, who wouldn’t suck on the teat of the rich if given the chance? The fun of the beginning of the film comes from watching Ki-woo and the rest of the family infiltrate the Park house as individual workers pretending to only know each other through vague networks: Ki-jung (Park So-dam) becomes an art therapist to the young boy Da-song, Chung-sook the mother (Jang Hye-jin) as the Park’s housekeeper, and Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) the father as their driver. ![]() They’re scrabbling to survive, but catch a lucky break when Ki-woo scores a job tutoring the daughter of the wealthy Park family, Da-hae. They let the smoke from the public fumigation into their apartment for some free disinfectant. In the opening scene, the family son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) hunts for a Wi-Fi signal to leech off while the rest of his family folds pizza boxes for cash. ![]() Half-basements are distinctively Korean spaces in urban centers like Seoul, and while the Kim house is firmly below ground, it still “wants to believe it’s above the ground.” Their home is an architectural purgatory that just meets the threshold of acceptable living and a fitting reflection of their psychological states: mean, but still hopeful. The movie starts in the half-basement apartment of the Kim family, with windows that barely peer above the ground. Just as he called Snowpiercer - his film about class revolution set in a dystopia - his “hallway movie,” he has called Parasite his “stairway movie.” It is an upstairs-downstairs film that explores every available rung on the ladder of class aspirationalism. Parasite, Bong’s latest, gut-twisting, Cannes Award–winning film, is no different. As with many of his films, Bong Joon-ho has his eye on the superstructure that binds society together and continues to grind down the bones of its protagonists long after the final frame. Despite the unspeakable horrors each character has witnessed, the world still spins, impassive and unmoved by the preceding events. The world appears unchanged, but they are no longer the same. We are republishing the piece ahead of the 2020 Academy Awards, during which Parasite will compete in the Best Picture field, among other categories.īong Joon-ho movies tend to end where they begin: The detective in Memories of Murder returns to the ditch where he discovers one of the serial killer’s first victims the titular mother in Mother dances, her arms swaying like wheatgrass the little girl Mija returns to the countryside after saving her pet from a slaughterhouse in Okja. This article was originally published in 2019. The director explains his coda: “I thought it was being real and honest with the audience.”
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