Monday, June 8, 2020

Parasite

Well then. Wow.


Okay! I see where you're coming from now with the whole Best Picture winner, and highly deserving of it I must say. Parasite grabbed hold of me from the opening shot, and kept me guessing until end credits. The story centers around a lower class family slowly integrating themselves as workers of a upper class family, but through subterfuge and dirty tricks. And uh, it doesn't end well for anybody. I'm not saying a damn thing more about the plot, just go watch it. It is a trip! For a person who has never experienced cinema from Korea, I loved it! I gravitated very quickly to the main characters, in particular Kang-ho Song who plays the patriarch of the family who has a very go with the flow attitude and was a joy to watch, and found myself almost instantly absorbed into the story practically hanging on every scene just to see what happens next. Especially since well, an hour into the movie it starts getting heavy and you still have well over an hour left of film, so you constantly are formulating ideas on how this will go down until it finally does. This is so not a one and done film, I have seen many movies in my time where you watch it once and never have inclination to watch it again, and Parasite I am almost positive is a film that gets better each time you watch it. While it is a very basic story, very much a cautionary tale mixed with a bit of Shakespearian tragedy, it holds your attention and makes you get invested into the film. And I really must applaud the story for not having characters, now what exactly do I mean by that you might ask, well the simple fact is...there are no characters in the film. Only people. They are not good people, or bad people, but individuals that harbor both inside them. You see the Kim family slowly degrade themselves over the course of the movie due to their greed, and the Park family while not exactly horrible rich people still carry a bit of negativity in them and are very much enclosed inside their bubble of a world. The film does not choose sides, but shows how things are. It does show the gap between better off families and families who are barely scraping by, it does show that people can be really nice and really rude, it does show a slice of life that goes south real quick. And that is the only way I could ever explain the latter half of the events in this movie, it was shocking but sort of obvious. You know for a fact this is a story that will not end well pretty early on, and I figured that out by simply paying attention to the dialogue. This is a funny film but when a movie gets pretty funny, and it's not a comedy, I could tell I was going to see some very screwed up stuff eventually. An almost perfect balance of runtime dedicated to the more lightearted aspects before shifting gears to the more dark stuff. I gotta tell you, I was not disappointed by the ending at all. 4 stars, 8.5/10, watch it on Hulu, rent it, buy it, rewatch it in black and white, I already have a spot picked out for it in my DVD library, it is worth it.

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