Parasite
Starring: Cho Yeo Jeong, Park So Damn, Choi Woo Shik, Lee Sun Gyun, Jeong Ji So, Kang Ho Song, Park Myung Hoon, Jang Hye Jin, Lee Jeong Eun, Jeong Hyun Joon, Park Keun Rok, Park Seo Jun
Year Released: 2019
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Country: Korea
Where I Watched It: YouTube
Reason I Watched It: Park Seo Jun
Jobless, penniless, and, above all, hopeless, the unmotivated patriarch, Ki-Taek, and his equally unambitious family–his supportive wife, Chung-Sook; his cynical twentysomething daughter, Ki-Jung, and his college-age son, Ki-woo–occupy themselves by working for peanuts in their squalid basement-level apartment. Then, by sheer luck, a lucrative business proposition will pave the way for an ingeniously insidious scheme, as Ki-woo summons up the courage to pose as an English tutor for the teenage daughter of the affluent Park family. Now, the stage seems set for an unceasing winner-take-all class war. How does one get rid of a parasite?
I watched this movie because I saw that Park Seo Joon was in it and he was only in like the first five minutes. LOL. That didn’t stop me from watching the rest of the movie though. This movie was freaking nuts. Like, psycho crazy and I couldn’t stop watching it even though I had severe anxiety the entire time.
It’s about the class discrimination in Korea and centers around the Kim and the Park families. The Kim family is super poor and they live in slums of Seoul while the Park family is well off and lives in a gorgeous, contemporary home. When Park Seo Joon’s character, Min, leaves to study abroad, he approaches his college buddy, Ki Woo (of the Kim family) to take over his tutoring job for the Park’s high school-age daughter, Da Hye. After discussing the job with his family, Ki Woo decides to make a go of it and then cons his family into jobs for the Park family as well. It is amazingly crazy how the Kim family operates. They go from piss poor job to piss poor job together as a family. When Ki Woo starts working for the Park family, things really start to pick up for the Kim family. The Parks have a driver, a housekeeper and are looking for someone to work with their youngest son on his art and the Kim family go to extraordinary lengths to fit themselves into working for the Park family. The long time driver for the Park family runs into some trouble that is completely fabricated by the Kim family so that the Dad that can be the driver. The housekeeper runs into her own kind of trouble that was brought about by the Kim family, just so that they can move the Mom into the housekeeper role. Stuff like that.
The Park family wasn’t without their own set of craziness. Their son has behavioral problems and their daughter is a fast little thing, and the parents are completely oblivious to the way the real world for the Kim’s. You see just how divided the two families are by their lifestyles. The Kims are money hungry and will do whatever it takes for a bit of change while the Parks are wasteful and low key snobby and you see how their attitudes toward the different social classes that they belong to. The Kims lie at every turn to get more while the Parks believed anything that anyone told them just so that they didn’t have to deal with it themselves. The Parks threw money around like it was candy and the Kim’s were always thinking of the next lie they can tell to get something else from the Parks.
There is a huge divide between the rich and the poor in this movie. The poor folks live in the actual slums. When it rains, the poor suffer because their streets and their homes flood easily because they live in the literal basement of Korea and the rich don’t suffer at all since they’re literally at the top…everything trickles down so they’re comfortable and safe from the elements and living a hard life. So because of this, there’s a lot of resentment and the rich people are completely oblivious to it. They don’t understand and they low key don’t care either.
It was hard to watch this movie at times because seeing people so desperate, doing unspeakable things just to survive was really uncomfortable. There were so many times when the Kims were being sneaky as shit and doing shit they had no business doing that I had to pause the movie and walk away because I just knew that they were going to get caught and it was going to end bad for all of them. But then the house party for the Park’s son happens and I wasn’t expecting it so I was freaking floored when all was said and done. The way that this movie led up to that party was one crazy-ass ride and I’m not mad at all that I watched it. I’m not even mad that Park Seo Joon wasn’t in the rest of the movie. It was crazy and it was wild but it sure was entertaining at the same time that it was eye-opening. Should you watch it? Definitely.
Final Rating
Great review of this movie! I watched this about two months ago and I was so shocked but so entranced while watching.
Entranced is a great word to describe what we went through while watching this movie. So good!
I was very into this movie too. My Korean friend got me to watch it and I wasn’t sure it would be for me, but man, was it great. I was glued to my screen the entire time. It was very thought-provoking too and the ending quite sad. I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Yeah, that ending wiped me out. I wasn’t expecting it but it ended the movie the way that it was supposed to end so I wasn’t mad.