Movie Review: Parasite

A film that shifts with a doorbell and makes an impact and imprint at the Academy Awards. Parasite is a 6 academy award-winning film. It was released on October 5th, 2019. It’s a thriller/comedy directed by Bong Joon Ho, the director of other movies like The Host (2006) and Okja (2017). This movie follows the Kim family, a very low-income family, slowly making their way to all work for the Park family, a rich family. Throughout the film, it shows the Kims making their way into the Park’s wealthy family home. Director Bong really showed his whole potential with this film through how creatively and precisely he directed it. This movie leaves viewers confused and really gets their mind going. There’s a lot of mind play and you really have to pay attention to everything, I assure you’ll miss a detail if you wander off for more than 5 seconds, so for this movie you should keep your eyes and ears on. 

The movie starts out with the Kim family, Kim Ki Taek, the father, Kim Choong Sook, the mother, Kim Ki Woo, the brother, and Kim Ki Jung, the sister. Since they’re very low income, the family lives in a basement home “almost at the bottom but there’s still some hope”, says director Bong. Their family friend Min then gifts them a stone that supposedly brings wealth to families. Later on, he tells the son Kiwoo to replace him and become a tutor for a rich family’s daughter and from there he gets his whole family to work there, replacing all the former workers by sabotaging them. The sister becomes the art tutor for the family’s younger child, the dad a driver for the family, and the mom becomes a housekeeper. Later on in the movie, the rich family goes on a camping trip for their son’s birthday, while they’re gone the whole family decides to spend the time they’re gone at their house, that is until the doorbell mysteriously rings. The family is shocked as they think it’s the rich family coming back from the camping trip early but it turns out that the person ringing the doorbell was actually the old housekeeper and from there the movie takes a 180 turn. 

The directing of the movie is creative. Bong Joon Ho did an amazing job with directing as he conveyed a lot of emotions and meanings in each scene. There was a specific scene in the film that surprised me and made me really impressed. There was a 5-minute scene in the movie called ‘The Peach Scene’  where it showed their plan to sabotage the housekeeper. In this scene, director Bong managed to Include 60 different shots in a very creative manner in just a little over 5 minutes, some shots referencing and foreshadowing other shots in the scene and making the peach the key metaphor and component for this whole scene. Another scene from the movie that showed its brilliant cinematography was when the doorbell rang at about the 50-minute mark. The film transitions to a completely different tone and genre, it goes from comedy to thriller with just a doorbell ringing. The film seems like it has transitioned to a completely different movie with its sudden change of tone. Director Bong manages to change the tone of the movie from comedy to thriller, then to mystery, and then go back to comedy as if it was nothing and the movie does a great job portraying just how effortlessly and seamlessly Director Bong can make these tone shifts. 

 The whole movie, start to finish, is immaculate and a perfect cinematic masterpiece. Director Bong didn’t miss a spot with this movie and everything fit like a perfect game of Tetris. There are so many plot twists and unexpected things in this movie that you’re always at the edge of your seat trying to decipher what’s going to happen next. It’s so precise that I had to watch it twice just to catch some tiny details in the film and make you think how much hard work and thought was put into this movie to make it portray and uncover what it did. I really recommend this film, I have never seen a film as perfectly and uniquely directed as this, it really made me check out all of Bong Joon Ho’s other works because his directing immersed me and really interested me. Like Bong said, “Once you overcome the 1-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films”.