Bong Joon-ho’s climactic Oscar triumph in February with his scabrous satire Parasite seems now like something from another era. It was maybe the film world’s last happy international event and talking-point before the industry was plunged into lockdown, chaos and a fearful sense that things might never be the same again. But the spectacular success of Parasite brought a welcome revival on UK streaming services of so much of this director’s great back catalogue, including his remarkable Memories of Murder from 2003, based on South Korea’s then unsolved Hwaseong serial murders of the late 1980s – the film sparked an upsurge of interest in the case, and led finally to the culprit’s identification in 2019. Parasite continues to exert a grip, and even had the distinction of getting a luxury-connoisseur black-and-white version released. That was certainly an intriguing new slant, though in my view not as good as the richly and densely coloured original.
Parasite, in all its cruelty and ingenuity, actually seems even more claustrophobically appropriate to our new world of hunkering down uneasily together with our families, and forming bubbles with other households, or perhaps transgressing, going into bubbles where we have no business and disobeying physical distancing rules. Perhaps the film is fundamentally about precisely this – the abolition of distancing rules, a world in which the underclass are cramped together and then get up close and personal with the overclass. It’s a film whose satirical reflex extends to a vision of South and North Korea living together in paranoid, resentful intimacy.
The anti-heroes are a dysfunctional family of parasites: dad is laid-back loafer Ki-taek (a wonderful performance from Bong’s veteran repertory player Song Kang-ho) and the mum is former track star Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin). The son is Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik), a lazy young guy who never made it to college, and the daughter is Ki-jung (Park So-dam), a very cool customer with an artistic gift for web-based fraud. By fraudulently posing as a college student, Ki-woo gets a chance to tutor the teenage daughter of a very rich family who live in a spectacular modernist house in the grander part of town. Cunningly, Ki-woo can see how to get every single member of his family employed in this household – as a second tutor (daughter), housekeeper (mum) and chauffeur (dad), all pretending to be unrelated and complete strangers to each other. They are a whole family of cuckoos in a luxurious new nest. But the host family’s younger kid wonderingly points out that they all smell alike – and that they smell of poor people.
Parasite is about an invasion of the lifestyle snatchers: it is about status envy, aspiration and materialism, about the patriarchal family unit and the idea of having (or leasing) servants whose intimacy so easily congeals into hostility. It’s comparable to the 1963 Joseph Losey classic The Servant in which Dirk Bogarde’s valet somehow gets the psychological upper hand over his master. And Parasite is also part of Korean cinema’s rich seam of “servant” dramas: like The Housemaid by Kim Ki-young in 1960, remade in 2010 by Im Sang-soo and also Park Chan-wook’s classic servant class mystery drama The Handmaiden.
What it’s also about is visibility: the richer and more successful you are, the more visible you are – and financial shame or debt erases people, photoshops them from the picture, pushes them down into the basement of society. And Parasite gestures at something else: parasites are not in fact destined to be the underdogs forever. When their insidious, predatory work is complete, they become the masters: they are the face of power. Parasite positively hums with malice.
