Parasite (2019)
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Parasite Movie Review
Parasite is a 2019 South Korean thriller comedy film directed by Bong Joon-ho. It’s another one of the director’s overrated pictures.
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“If I had all this I would be kinder“
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Greed and class discrimination threaten the newly formed symbiotic relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan. That’s the basic premise of this movie, but the entire plot is very difficult to explain, and honestly incredibly annoying.
At first, I found it solid, and I was engaged, but as the movie progressed, it became crazier and crazier to the point that I lost my patience with it entirely and I gave up. This story is so difficult to believe owing to many increasingly ridiculous, thoroughly implausible plot points that made no sense whatsoever.
The characters are caricatures. The interactions between some of them worked and as a family, they are strong, but individually not at all. The acting is fine, but the movie painted its characters way too often in overly comedic brushes.
Parasite looks good owing to very strong cinematography, and some quite cinematic touches here and there, especially in the third act. I found the interior design of course amazing given that it’s a big part of the film’s plot. The score is also solid. The entire film is technically rather competent.
But the direction from Bong Joon-ho is very problematic as he doesn’t know what he’s trying to say or do. He juggles with different genres in such an inefficient manner as the movie never really knows what it wants to be. It is very comedic at times, then it suddenly becomes a thriller, then a social drama.
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And you can change genres and still be fine (Bollywood movies for instance), but this is a bad example of that mixing of the genres as it’s done poorly and none of those areas are successful unfortunately. The flick isn’t really funny despite a couple of quite amusing moments of dialogue, and it’s never really thrilling nor is it a competent social commentary on class divide in South Korea. It’s just a movie about annoying or plain unlikable people ending up in many implausible situations.
What movie is Parasite? Is it a comedy? Not really. Is it a thriller? It tries to be, but not successfully. Is it a social drama? Not in any more meaningful way, no. Yes, this film juggles between different genres and it fails miserably at all of them, leading to another unlikable in characters, entirely implausible in plot mess from ever-chaotic director Bong Joon-ho.
