Compromised host

Parasite, the latest prize-winning film from South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho, is a savagely farcical comedy/drama with a whiplash streak of social commentary and a few stinging touches of horror film and theater of the absurd running through it.

Its central story concerns the mutual misadventures of two families, one poor and the other wealthy. The down-at-the-heels members of the Kim family live in a squalid basement apartment and are mostly unemployed. They’re indifferently educated, lacking in marketable skills, and not particularly attentive to ambition or any other bourgeois values. But they do have a certain roguish flair for forgery and the role-playing of con artists, and that’s what soon brings them all into the lives of the very well-heeled Park family.

The Kims’ college-age son (Choi Woo-sik) wangles his way into a job as an English tutor for the Parks’ teenage daughter (Jung Ziso), and soon contrives an opportunity for his older sister (Park So-dam) to serve, under an assumed name, as an art tutor for the Parks’ “gifted” young son (Jung Hyeon-jun). Eventually, further roguish contrivances from the Kim siblings bring both their parents into employment with the Park family—with their father (Song Kang-ho) replacing the family’s chauffeur, and their mother (Chang Hye-jin) replacing the family’s imperious longtime nanny and housekeeper (Lee Jung-eun).

An air of rowdy comedy prevails through most of these episodes in which the Kims finagle employment from the mostly unwitting Parks. But the harsh contrasts between poverty and wealth bode ill right from the start, and the signs that all this probably won’t end well really start to kick in when we (and the Kims) discover that there’s yet another family and yet another basement dwelling in this story and in the palatial “modernistic” house that is its main setting. The sardonic social comedy and satire continue throughout, but with moments of brutal horror becoming more prominent.

For all that may sound heavy-handed (and some of it certainly is), Parasite is an uncommonly rich experience quite apart from its moments of violence. As a running commentary on the ethics and economics of contemporary consumer culture, it has an impressive breadth and complexity. And even with the broad strokes and simplifications of comedy and satire, its characterizations of the Kims and the Parks are unexpectedly nuanced and even-handed.

I think it says something special about Parasite that, while it’s well-acted throughout, the best acting in the film comes in two roles that at first seem inconsequential: the flutteringly neurotic Mrs. Park (Jo Yeo-jeong) and the Park family’s astoundingly irrepressible housekeeper, who is also the film’s most surprisingly double-sided character.