Last Updated on September 28, 2020 by rob
The son and daughter of a poor family from the slums (led by Kang Song-ho as the father) inveigle their way into an affluent household as tutors to the owners children. As the newcomers scheme to turf out the chauffeur and a long serving housemaid (Jang Hye-jin) so their father and mother can replace them all seems to be going well. But one rainy night weeks later, while the owners are off on a family camping trip, said former long serving housemaid turns up at the front door and begs to be let back in. See, she’s left something in the cellar and if she could just collect it.. won’t take a minute…
A pitch black comedy from Snowpiercer’s Bong Joon-ho which feels very much like a thematic companion piece to that film. Once again it’s the haves and the have-nots of the world colliding head on although in this film the old saying that ‘There’s always somebody worse off than yourself’ wreaks havoc on our slovenly family via a brilliantly bonkers plot twist that occurs about halfway through when the former housekeeper turns up and everything you thought you knew about where this film was going becomes thrillingly, deliriously unpredictable. Joon-ho, who also co-wrote the script, excels in piling one fascinatingly horrible situation on top of another and he has a keen eye for sly visual metaphors. I enjoyed the sight of the child’s painting of the ghost he believes to be roaming his luxurious house. “It’s so metaphorical” declares Choi Woo-sik’s English tutor in an effort to impress the child’s mother.
But his glib words turn out to be truer than he could ever have imagined and for the child it proves a case of foreshadowing when the monster of his nightmares ends up crashing his own birthday party. I was also very taken by the sequence in which Song-ho’s family – having partied wildly in their employers pad and only narrowly escaped discovery when they arrive back unexpectedly – return home to discover their basement flat swamped by a sewage overflow that’s flooded the entire street. The sight of Park So-dam’s daughter forlornly puffing away on a cigarette while perched helplessly atop an overflowing toilet is as perfect a metaphor for the shitstorm that’s about to engulf them all as one could hope for. To his credit you never feel like director Bong is taking sides here (the rich are trivial and callous, the poor smelly and selfish, but both families are also loving and supportive of each other) even as we proceed en route to the inevitable bloodbath.
The actors feel perfectly cast and I really enjoyed So-dam’s turn as the sweetly smiling but conscienceless daughter who bullshits her way into becoming art tutor to the family’s young son Da-Song. And there’s an absolutely scene stealing performance here from another actress, Jang Hye-jin, playing a former housemaid who ends up dismissed early on but comes roaring back into the action revealing an entirely different side to her previously officious character. She’s great and of all the characters here she’s the one I most warmed to. The film is beautifully made (the modernist house with its huge glass window views and open plan interiors is a marvel to behold), very funny, creepy, the performances, cinematography and production values are immaculate (a sequence of Song-ho and family returning to their basement dwelling from the dream home they’ve been working in; a literal descent down endless steps and underground tunnels, is brilliantly edited and feels like a nod to the relative positions of hero and villain in Kurosawa’s 1963 thriller High and Low) but for all that I never believed for one second that any of these characters existed outside the world of the movie.
Like much of Park Chan-wook’s work, you feel you’re watching a meticulously designed yet hermetically sealed chamber piece populated by characters doing funny/ghastly things to each other for our amusement. It’s clever and entertaining (FWIW, it won the Palme D’or at this year’s Cannes film festival) but it doesn’t touch the heart. There is something about this director’s style that keeps his characters at arms length from the viewer. We recognise the impulses that drive them all and yet none of them truly get under our skin. Neither did I feel the film had anything new to say about the divide between rich and the poor or even (as events work out here) the poor versus other poor. That said, I certainly enjoyed Parasite but for all that it struck me as the sort of film that doesn’t much linger once it’s ended. It is stylish, well acted and gripping though.
