It was the day before the Oscars when I saw Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. A shoe in for foreign language award and in the running for the best film and director awards, it has made an impression like Roma did last year. In fact, the reviews have been even more positive, with many declaring it one of the best films of the decade that has just ended.
It is especially important not to give away any spoilers with this film, so I will just say that it is about an impoverished family of four in Korea who find a way to all gain employment with a wealthy family. What follows is a genre mixing of suspense, social drama, and even horror. In many ways, in highlighting the hypocrisy if the rich and the inequality ingrained in society, it reminded me of Jordan Peele’s Us.
A film that tried the same thing with race last year and I think it does it more successfully in most ways. There is one extended sequence when the family’s secret may be discovered that is almost Hitchcockian in its brilliant level of suspense. It is a pity then that the film’s quality dips after that. A violent incident feels like a step too far and underlines that the movie lacks subtlety at times.
What it does have though is a great ensemble cast with Kan-ho Song and Sun-kyun Lee as the family patriarchs, as well as So-dam Park and especially Ji-so Yung as their daughters.
Ultimately, it is looking like Parasite will miss out to 1917 in the major Oscar categories and I didn’t find it to be the masterpiece that many have claimed – we had those in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ and ‘The Irishman’ that are both probably amongst the also-rans in the best film race – it is still a very fine film.
Rating: 8 out of 10