PARASITE
****
Dir: Bong Joon-ho (15, 132 mins)
This brilliant South Korean drama, from the director of The Host and Snowpiercer, defies expectations, blending comedy, horror and caustic social satire to gripping effect. Kim Ki-taek (played by Kang-ho Song) and his family all live in poverty in the slums, where their ramshackle flat is urinated on regularly and none of them have proper jobs. By chance, thanks to a friend, his son inveigles himself into the lives of the upper-class, wealthy Parks, taking over as a tutor to their daughter. The unemployed family then start to occupy other roles in the household: Ki-taek becoming the family driver, his wife the maid and his daughter an art therapist for the younger son, all by cunning subterfuge. Then events start to get darker and darker. To reveal more would reduce the delightful, arcane twists in the film; suffice to say, events lead to violence. The house, with all its myriad secrets and shady basement, was specially built for the film, along with the slum where the family suffer an excruciatingly vivid flood. Bong Joon-ho always builds a specific world that has a moral centre. Following on from the criminally underrated science fiction epic Snowpiercer and animal rights drama Okja, Joon-ho has created another world, this time steeped in reality rather than fantasy, but with the same themes of social mobility and exploitation. He always subverts genre, but Parasite transcends into a cutting comment on class, wealth and ignorance. The cast are all superb, the Parks blissfully ignorant of the tribulations of the poor and Song, as the patriarch of his own struggling family, is magnificent, as events become more farcical and tragic. Truly unlike anything you’ve ever seen, this is an original, mind-bending and ultimately moving experience.
Opens Feb 7
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