Parasite

Last night I relented and went to see Parasite. I did not particularly care about seeing this movie, nor did I expect to like it. When I first saw the trailer earlier this year, I was struck by how closely aspects of its mise-en-scène echoed tropes used in other recent dark comedies: slick modern house? Ex Machina. With a twisted secret? The One I Love. The injustice of poverty? Shoplifters. Identity farce? Toni Erdmann. Nothing about it seemed new — and I didn’t care for most of those earlier movies anyway.

But I’m only human: the media swayed me. I decided to give it a shot.

Now I know what I was missing. It wasn’t much.

Parasite is a contrived, false satire that tugs at the thread of plausibility long after it’s snapped. It opens with the Kim family — a quartet of wise-asses who live in a basement hovel (literally below the poverty line) yet somehow maintain healthy complexions and shimmering hair — as they fold pizza boxes for extra cash. Meanwhile, a fumigator walks along the street above their home, visible through ground-level windows. As he nears them, spraying his gases, the father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), suggests that they not close the windows. “This way we get free fumigation.” So the fumigator sends his poisons into the Kim apartment and everyone hacks from the polluted air. It’s like they’re parasites!, the movie virtually shouts at us. Get it?

A short while later (miraculously, their home and countenances now pesticide-free), the family debates whether or not to ward off a drunk who’s peeing in their street. But they needn’t bother: in the first of a stream of narrative conveniences as endless as the souse’s urine flow, a family friend, Min-hyuk (the gorgeous and all-too-brief Park Seo-joon), shows up and shoos the man away. He’s come to give the family a gift: a rather cryptically pretty rock that’s meant to “bring its owners great fortune.”

If there are any doubts as to whether or not the mineral’s alleged power is based in fact, Min-hyuk quickly dispels them: he offers the Kim’s son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), his place as English tutor to a wealthy family — the Parks — while he studies abroad. The young man accepts, and, after meeting the Park family (led by Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong), he conspires to trick the gullible couple into hiring every other member of his own family: his father as the driver; his sister (Park So-dam) as an “art therapist;” and his mother (Chang Hyae-jin) as the maid.

Before you know it, all the Kims are working for the Joneses (or Parkses). And then things get “weird.”

Or that’s what writer and director Bong Joon-ho would like to think. The truth is, his twist hasn’t nearly the punch I was hoping it would have; I’d have given him much more credit if he’d introduced a supernatural or monstrous element to the proceedings — then at least Parasite’s cartoonish sensibility would’ve paid off. But no: he keeps things human, only his understanding of humans is so narrow that it doesn’t register as human at all. I sensed the same lack of depth in Snowpiercer (2013), his unnuanced action-thriller about class consciousness. That movie leaned on heavy-handed metaphor and unambiguous visual cues to get its point across; the same is true of Parasite, only it doesn’t have the buffer of being set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s set in the here-and-now, and it doesn't belong anywhere.

Mr. Bong’s imagination is about as sophisticated as that of a thirteen-year-old — ripe to be sure, but without perspective or insight. He delights in telling us what we already know, and nothing else. “Very metaphorical!,” Ki-woo exclaims on a couple occasions. Is Bong parodying himself, or clueless enough to believe that he’s giving us a necessary hint?

To be fair, there are one or two moments when Parasite approaches something resembling value. In one sequence, the Kims’ apartment is flooded by rain and they’re forced to spend the night in a gym. They sleep on cots alongside hundreds of other people, all displaced by the weather. Such events are not metaphorical: they represent present living conditions for millions of people — and near-future conditions for millions more. One must applaud Mr. Bong for that much at least: he’s made an “entertaining” movie that dares to address crises in climate and economy so often ignored by mainstream cinema. This kind of conscious storytelling is in increasingly high demand. Good on him for getting in on the ground floor. (Or, if you will, basement.)

Still. There’s the movie as a movie. And I’m behooved to perceive Parasite as anything other than an affront to intelligence and taste. I know this is brutal — it may be unfair of me to write all this. But I maintain that movies can do more than play to the most basic dimensions of human understanding. That’s what Mr. Bong does here, and really, it isn’t his fault. We can’t blame him for not having more to say. How ironic that, like the oblivious Parks, audiences have been shouldering up to this pile of shit like it’s a messenger from heaven.

Never underestimate the potential of a movie that hits all the right notes at just the right time. Those notes may amount to a lush concerto, or just a lot of pretty noise.