Parasite (2019)

You know that feeling when you've spent an entire day cooking Christmas dinner, every dish perfectly timed, the whole house smelling incredible, and then the meal itself is over in ten minutes? That's Parasite. Two hours of meticulous, methodical set-up for a five-minute nuclear ending that detonates so completely you're left staring at the credits, mouth open, wondering what on earth you just witnessed. It's extraordinary filmmaking. It's also, just slightly, too much of a slow burn for its own good.

Bong Joon-ho is working at the very top of his craft here. The film shifts between dark comedy, thriller and social satire so fluidly, sometimes within the same scene, that you'd think the tonal whiplash alone would knock it off balance. It doesn't. Somehow it holds together, and holds together brilliantly. The class commentary isn't remotely subtle, but it doesn't need to be. The stark contrast between the struggling Kim family and the obliviously privileged Parks is drawn so clearly and so unsettlingly that it almost feels like a provocation. This is a film that wants you uncomfortable, and it gets what it wants.

I'll admit I found myself wondering how much more viscerally the class anxiety would land if I were Korean. There's clearly something specific and deeply felt in the way Bong frames these two households, the geography of wealth and poverty, the way physical space becomes a metaphor for social mobility. It reads powerfully even from the outside, but I suspect there's a whole additional layer of recognition for Korean audiences that I'm only grazing the surface of. It's worth sitting with that thought rather than dismissing it.

What the film does brilliantly, regardless of where you're watching it from, is keep you genuinely off-balance. You think you know where it's going. You construct your little theory about how this is all going to resolve. And then it pulls the rug out, and you scramble to rebuild, and then it pulls it out again. By the time the climax arrives, it's controlled chaos, frantic and visceral and completely unpredictable. The payoff, when it comes, is genuinely stunning.

If you've spent any time with Korean cinema, a lot of this will feel familiar in the best possible way. That slow-burn storytelling that demands your patience, those tonal lurches that shouldn't work but absolutely do, the way darkness and absurdist humour sit side by side without either cancelling the other out. I've written about similar qualities in Memories of Murder, and I think Bong carries a lot of the same instincts across both films. The Handmaiden does something similar with class and duplicity, and if The Handmaiden clicked for you, there's every chance Parasite will too.

So why not five stars? Because the pacing, as masterful as it is in execution, is a genuine ask. This isn't Oldboy, where every scene feels like it's earning its place and the rhythm never loosens its grip. There are stretches of Parasite where I felt the film testing my patience in ways that felt less intentional and more just... long. The Christmas dinner analogy keeps coming back to me. When the ending finally explodes, it's so good, so completely unhinged and emotionally devastating, that part of me wishes we'd spent a little less time getting there. The meal deserved more breathing room.

Still, this is one of the best films of the 21st century. I'll say it plainly. The fact that I'm docking a star for pacing doesn't change the fact that I was floored by it, that it's stuck with me, and that Bong Joon-ho pulled off something genuinely rare: a film that's funny, tense, shocking and politically serious all at once, without ever feeling like it's hedging its bets.

Four stars. See it if you haven't. And if you have, see it again, because you probably missed more than you think.

Rating: ★★★★  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2023-11-16

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