Parasite

Bong Joon Ho's Parasite (2019) is so convincingly crafted and gripping that its various contrivances  (a disabling allergy to peaches, for instance, and plot points telegraphed in Morse code) seem, either, invisible or charming.  The movie, that plays like a deranged mash-up of Kore-Eda's Shoplifters and Jordan Peele's Us, seems just about perfect while the viewer is under its spell.  Only later do some slight reservations arise on the basis of the film's slightly absurd plotting -- but the film's classically lucid narrative style, and, ultimately, its densely allegorical implications override objections.  Allegory requires symbols, objective correlatives, and bizarre plot twists to make its point.  When we read Flannery O'Connor, we are conscious that the odd things that occur are interesting because grotesque in their own right, but, also, as emblems for the narratives deeper meanings.  On some deep level, Parasite is like Flannery O'Connor -- it's grotesque plot is devised to communicate to us troubling intimations about inequality in society.  The film is so pertinent to the decade in which we live that I expect the picture will be remade in Hollywood within the next 18 months -- with a cast that is half-Latino or African-American, I suspect that the film will resonate even more deeply in this country than South Korea.

Parasite is the story of two families.  The Kim family live in a semi-basement apartment that has cockroaches, with a smelly-looking and bizarre bathroom raised on tile platform in a niche, and a perfect vantage to observe drunks urinating against the alley wall outside.  The Kim's are not exactly industrious -- they eke out a living by petty crime and piece-work folding pizza boxes.  Far above the Kim's (both literally and figuratively) are the Park family -- they inhabit a vast post-modernist mansion designed by a renowned architect in a compound that includes a spacious back yard and huge fortified walls.  The Park family are self-satisfied, very wealthy, and not too smart.  (As used to be said about the younger George Bush, they were born on third base but think they hit a triple.)  Mrs. Park, an attractive somewhat child-like woman, is the doting mother of two children; she is the kind of mother who is not satisfied unless her kids are both precocious and, also, slightly unwell, that is, neurotic.  The enterprising eldest son in the Kim family takes over as English tutor to the debutante daughter in the Park clan.  (The original tutor has gone to study abroad.)    Kim Jr. circumspectly accuses the housekeeper of concealing tuberculosis from her employers -- in fact, the poor woman is hyper-allergenic to peach fuzz and he has seeded her hair with the stuff.  When the miserable, sneezing housekeeper is fired, he arranges for his mother to take over that position.  The clever and attractive Kim family daughter has already insinuated herself into the good graces of the Parks' -- she purports to be an art teacher and art therapist, recognizing in the bratty little boy, as she says, a "Basquiat-like genius" as well as the signs of profound childhood trauma.  (As it happens, the little boy has seen a ghost emerging from the basement of the mansion.)  Miss Kim discretely removes her panties and places them in one of the Park family's Mercedes Benz sedans.  This maneuver results in the firing of the chauffeur, who is, needless, to say replaced by her father, Kim Sr. With every member of the family gainfully employed by the Parks, the Kim clan are in an excellent position to prosper.  Although not acknowledging that they are all related, and each equipped with elaborate cover stories, the Kim's make the mistake of exploiting their new-found prosperity by celebrating on a dark and rainy night when the Park family has gone "camping" -- more like "glamping" or "glamor-camping".  The four members of the Kim family are feasting and boozing it up in the Park's mansion when they receive word from the lady of the house that the campground is flooded and that theyhave aborted their weekend venture wealthy and are are returning home, indeed, only eight minutes away.  And, it's at this point, about midway through the movie that things start to go horribly wrong, a concatenation of events that leads to a gory massacre at the end of the film.  These misfortunes arise because in order to finagle their way into the Park household, the Kim's have accused the servants already working in the compound of misdeeds, loathsome illnesses, and the like.  These actions have consequences and they are spectacular.

Spoilers follow:  During the illicit feast, the discharged housekeeper replaced by Mrs. Kim appears, bedraggled in the driving rainstorm.  It turns out that the house is equipped with a secret bunker deep  underground, a sort of panic room qua bomb shelter which is unknown to the Park family.  The woman's husband, a thug, has been secretly living in the hidden cellar.  When she was fired on the basis of a TB scare, he was trapped in the secret bunker and, in fact, starving.  The maid frees him and a brutal brawl ensues -- the discharged maid plans to blackmail the Kim interlopers with the result that people get beaten up, hurled down concrete steps, and, ultimately, tied-up in the concealed bunker.  The downpour floods the slums and when the Kim family returns to their "semi-basement apartment," it is all underwater with the toilet on the tile pedestal periodically erupting in geysers of human excrement.  Kim father and son are forced to spend the night in a noisome gymnasium full of refugees from the flooded slums. They conspire, presumably to murder the inhabitants of the secret bunker, now either unconscious or tied up in the subterranean vault.  (Their conspiracy is an odd one -- they both agree that the best plan is no plan at all.  But their intent seems pretty clear.)  In the meantime, the sun has come out and it is a lovely day and Mrs. Park decides to hold a birthday party for her son who is obsessed with American Indians.  (He has been camping in the backyard in the downpour in a teepee.)  The thug in the cellar has been beating his head against a light switch that is connected to an upstairs fixture -- he is flashing out Morse Code:  H-E-L-P  M-E.  In the process, he's ripped open his forehead and is bleeding. copiously.  His wife, the previous maid, has died as a result of a subdural hematoma and is sprawled across the threshold to the underground compound. The Park family and their wealthy friends are now enjoying a garden party.  Mr. Park and Mr. Kim are hiding in the bush, dressed as Red Indians and carrying hatchets -- in fact, Mr. Kim looks a lot like Geronimo.  Their plan is to leap out of the bushes and pretend to attack Mrs. Park and the little boy.  The wounded thug in the basement gets loose, his face a mask of blood, he seizes a big knife, and all hell breaks loose at the garden party.  In the ensuing melee, Mr. Kim pushed to the limits of his endurance stabs Mr. Park to death and, then, flees.  (He is insulted because Park has wrinkled his nose at Kim's smell -- after all, Kim has spent the night in a gymnasium sleeping among hundreds of people drenched in sewer water.)  The film has a brief haunting coda, a kind of fantasy or flash-forward that suggests indelibly the basis for the poor accepting the power that the rich exert over them.  In Capitalist societies, even the very poor admire the rich because they believe that they, too, have the opportunity to prosper and become wealthy themselves -- although, of course, this idea is mostly just a pious fraud. 

The plot is even more complex than I have suggested, although everything is clear enough as it is happening on-screen.  Since I had to wink shut my eyes a couple time during the bloody massacre at the film's end, I'm not entirely sure who killed whom and in what order -- but I got the gist of things.  Clearly, there are some cultural references that elude an American audience.  I have the suspicion that the enterprising but poverty-stricken Kim family are refugees from North Korea or rural environs near the DMZ -- but this isn't clear to me.  At one point, one of the Kim's references a North Korean broadcaster threatening that "missiles will rain down on the south."  In general, there is a sense of social stratification that is not wholly clear to me and that may be founded, as well, in accents and ways of speaking that can't be conveyed in subtitles.  One plot point involves a so-called "Scholar's Stone" -- that is a unique and strangely shaped rock that has been collected by a grandfather in the Kim family and that has been kept in a beautiful wooden case.  This artifact suggests that previous generations of the Kim family were not only highly literate but, also, cultured -- again, I'm not sure what this means, although the rock is important in the massacre at the end of the film:  it's used as a lethal bludgeon.  In general terms, the film suggests that Korean society is comprised of those who are subject to hideous flooding, the deluge in the center of the film, and those who are immune to such perils because of their ill-deserved wealth.  The Kim's live literally in the "lower depths" --this is demonstrated in a breathtaking sequence of shots that show the flood.  The movie is designed as largely horizontal, with the camera tracking and dollying through the huge Park home.  But when the Kim family leaves the Park compound, we see them running alongside the flooding river and, then, descending through tenement canyons down to the lowest level of the city where everything is submerged under flooding sewage.  These sequences "read" like a descent into Hell and they are the equivalent of the final scenes in Us in which the heroine descends into the subterranean world from which their half-crazed doubles have emerged.  The Park and Kim families are, in effect, doubles of one another:  Husband and wife, with two children -- a boy and a girl.  The film suggests several propositions:  society consists of people playing socially assigned roles of parasite or host, although it's not wholly clear here who is the parasite and who the host:  on an obvious level, the Kim family lives as a parasite on the Parks -- but, perhaps, the Parks are really parasites on the work required to support them expended by the Kim's.  Second, income inequality consigns some to flooded slums while others live in mountaintop refuges -- the poor "smell" of the "subways" someone says:  "Not that I go down there any more."  Third, the storm is coming and there will be a high price to be paid on the day of reckoning:  when the poor go Apache on us, then, the streets will be full of blood.