- I feel like there should be a clinical term for the nervous feeling I get while watching a seemingly great movie begin to fly off the rails. Thirdactosis? Nostickthelandingitis?? I've experienced this sensation on many occasions, with notable flare-ups occurring during There Will be Blood, Arrival, and Get Out. Unfortunately, I recently began experiencing symptoms of this affliction while watching Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, and for good reason: the last half-hour or so of this movie is a mindlessly violent and disappointing disaster. But the first 75% was great! I feel like they should make a special Oscar statue that is missing one leg.
- But first let me focus on the many spectacular parts of this film that occupy most of its runtime. The initial situation is that the poor Kim family, consisting of parents Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) and siblings Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and Ki-jung (Park So-dam), is desperate for work. They live in cramped semi-basement apartment featuring a toilet that seems like an afterthought, which is coincidentally the only place they can connect to wi-fi. Inebriates routinely urinate on their window and the street fumigators infuse the neighborhood with a cloud of poisonous fog. What little money the Kims have comes from folding pizza boxes for a delivery company that appears to be run by a teenager until Ki-woo lands a job tutoring an affluent girl named Park Da-hye (Jung Ji-so).
- Unlike the Kims, Da-hye's parents (Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong) are what you might call conspicuously wealthy. They have three spoiled dogs, a maid (Lee Jung-eun), and a chauffer (Park Geun-rok) and even intend to enroll their youngest (Jung Hyeon-jun) in art lessons. As it happens, Ki-woo would be happy to recommend a famous art teacher, who is actually just his unscrupulous sister. Through a series of subtle and brilliant machinations involving sprinkled peach fuzz, discarded panties, and plenty of forgeries, all four Kims manage to infiltrate the Park household, posing as distinctly more qualified versions of themselves. Just when it seems like the Kims have solved their money problems, a brief cameo by Alfred Hitchcock (or rather, his picture on a binder), suggests that suspense and mischief may soon be afoot. Without giving too much away, let me just say that another character (Park Myung-hoon) in the story turns out to have a worse basement dwelling than the Kims.
- As entertaining as it is to watch the Kims literally move up in the world, Parasite somehow gets even better when the Parks depart on a camping trip. A house party quickly transforms into a hostage situation, followed by a brawl, followed by one of the tensest hiding sequences I've seen in a long time. But just after the Kims return home to find their basement apartment completely flooded, it's as though the immensely talented Bong Joon-ho were replaced by the absurd, unsubtle schlockmeister who directed Snowpiercer. Slow-motion bloodbaths abound, and suddenly I find myself forgetting how great this film's acting, direction, set design, and cinematography once were. If you or a member of your family suffers from botchedendopathy, you may just want to have this Parasite removed.
