Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2020): South Korea

Reviewed by Scott Kipp at SBIFF 2020.

Parasite is a masterpiece and should win at least one major Academy Award. The plot of the story is filled with interesting twists and turns and the acting and cinematography was delicious. When I left the theater, I couldn’t stop talking about all that I had seen and the mastery of the storytelling.

The start of the movie really drew me in because of how funny the poor Kim family was. It was amazing how they masterminded their way into the luxurious Park family. They conned the Parks who never saw what was coming at them.

The drama created from having the poor Kim family working for the extravagantly rich Park family was rife for drama. With the continual widening of the gap between rich and poor, this movie did a great comparison of the disparity between the two lifestyles. I enjoyed seeing the underdog Kims getting the best of the Parks.

Like in Bong’s film Mother, I could see a lot of parallels between Bong and Hitchcock. What they both do is put ordinary people in extraordinary situations where they have to act in ways that are contrary to my expectations. The movie does a great job of showing how we are products of our environments and how things can get out of control.

One of my favorite aspects of the movie is how they used stairs to enter the underworld of the lower reaches of society. Whenever they descended stairways, I knew that something dark was going to be discovered.  The most memorable scene was when the Kims left the hilltop mansion and walked down extreme staircases to reach their basement apartment. I’ve been in torrential downpours in Seoul and I could relate to the scene where the apartment floods.

I had the pleasure of seeing this movie at SBIFF 2020 and then seeing a two-hour tribute to the director Bong Joon Ho. The tributes at SBIFF are amazing and Bong was very open to discussing his life and his work. I found it very interesting that he spent most of his life watching or creating movies. He told us that he studied films from a young age and how honored he is to be up for academy awards with Scorsese and Tarantino. Bong is definitely a director of their caliber and should be honored with an Oscar for what he put on the screen.