Parasite (Preview)
Reviewed by Robert Koehler

Produced by Jang Young-hwan, Kwak Sin-ae, and Moon Yang-kwon; directed by Bong Joon Ho; screenplay by Bong Joon Ho and Han Jin-won; cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo; production design by Lee Ha-jun; costumes by Choi Se-yeon; edited by Yang Jinmo; music by Jung Jae-il; starring Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo Shik, Lee Sun-kyun, Park So Dam, Cho Yeo-jeong, Lee Jung Eun, Chang Hyae Jin, Jung Ziso,  and Jung Hyeon Jun. Color, 132 min., Korean dialogue with English subtitles. A NEON release.

When the history of this moment in world cinema is written, Parasite will take its place as the movie that got the moment right. How it does this is something that would take even more space than the space I have here to examine. The fact that it does this is why it’s one of the few works of Asian cinema to manage, once it screened to audiences in the West, what poker players call a “straight,” hitting the trifecta of being a huge critical, commercial, and industry hit. The only previous movies from East Asia to reach this stratospheric level are Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Seven Samurai (such a hit that Hollywood hatched a Western remake six years later, The Magnificent Seven [John Sturges, 1960]), and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). These are the only two previous East Asian movies seriously considered as possible Oscar best picture winners, the most valuable of film industry prizes. Parasite is the first to achieve this feat, winning not only best picture, but best directing, writing (original screenplay), and best international feature film for good measure.

As I write this, Parasite is as close as anyone can reasonably term a consensus critical phenomenon: this is the same movie that landed at number three on La Internacional Cinéfila, the superb poll of critics, programmers, and filmmakers worldwide conducted by Argentine critic Roger Koza; it ranked number two on Cahiers du cinéma’s year-end top-ten list; number one in Screen Daily’s poll of select critics at the Cannes Film Festival, and also in IndieWire’s poll of participating critics at Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or to nobody’s surprise. Parasite was also named either the best film and/or best international or so-called “foreign” film by many major critics’ associations, such as the National Society of Film Critics, and those in Los Angeles, New York, London, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Dallas–Fort Worth, Washington D.C., the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and even that mysterious organization, the National Board of Review. Its ninety-six score on the Metacritic Website, aggregating published critics, is one metric of the movie’s near-consensus support, which places it in the top thirty scoring movies of all time.

By mid-January, the movie has grossed an astronomical $130 million-plus worldwide, including $24 million-and-counting in North America. A non-English-language, so-called “art house” release grossing one million dollars at the U.S. theatrical box office has long been considered a major hit, and in the currently shrinking niche market, it’s now considered a Halley’s Comet event. Parasite may even double $24 million by the end of its earnings cycle in theaters and on home video.

Now, critical overviews of movies probably shouldn’t begin with how much money and how many prizes the movie has picked up along the way. But Parasite is different not only because of its historical moment but also because of how the movie so thoroughly and distinctly captures that moment. From the movie’s perspective, as written by director Bong Joon Ho and Jin Won Han (whose only significant previous credit is as Bong’s assistant director on his 2017 movie, Okja), our moment is defined by two overwhelming problems, one of which the movie is already famous for representing: the growing chasm between the rich and the poor. The other problem, a deepening extension of Bong’s great, obsessive theme—our decaying environment and climate crisis—plays out in Parasite as both metaphor and a conditional pivot point of Bong’s and Han’s intricate, clockwork plot.

The overwhelming success of Parasite speaks to a fascinating combination of forces. On one hand, this is a consummate entertainment operating in that most dangerous, high-wire territory of tragicomedy, and executed with masterful craft and command of comedy’s most difficult form—the farce. On the other, Parasite is an ideal expression of the anger animating a reinvigorated left, focused especially on widening economic inequalities and the growing drive for massive restructuring of society as crystallized in the Green New Deal, which could be a viable title for a Bong project. But even as the American left has been organizing at a level of activity not seen since the late Sixties, it’s likely that few in the United States were aware that their issues are also those of Korea, and by extension, a large majority of East Asia outside of Mainland China. The same anger that informs every minute of Parasite is allied with the epic, marathon battle for democracy playing out on the streets of Hong Kong…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2