Parasite

Almost immediately, a ridiculous story in a realistic setting depreciates in value as a topical statement. But it can still play tricks on our intuition and be a lot of fun, to boot. In retrospect, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was a shoo-in for Palme d’Or: it borrows filial scam artistry from Shoplifters and overlays that with incoherent moralism from The Square. The setup is straight out of a Coen brothers bungled-crime caper, but instead of shaking his fist at the heavens, Boon crosses his arms and stares wrathfully at the rich.

The director already demonstrated in Snowpiercer that it’s possible to be a genius with visuals and ungainly with political allegory, and Boon proves that anew in Parasite. This time, he applies his craft more sneakily: Alfred Hitchcock’s likeness appears—almost subliminally, at the edge of a frame; and there are shades of Polanski in the way camera movements construct dread. But I think Boon plays with our sympathies in a way that seemed to me much less assured. Underprivileged Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is selected to tutor the upper-crust Da-hye (Jung Ji-so) because he isn’t a frat boy who would take advantage of her. But we are disabused of his integrity early on; he has an affair with his pupil and hatches a plot to systematically replace Da-hye’s family’s domestic staff with his own hungry kin.

The Kim family revels in their cartoon schemes to hoodwink the dopily prestigious Park family; it’s an amusingly elaborate scam that seems to account for everything except for the fact that Ki-woo’s wealthier friend, who referred him to the Parks, would easily be able to out them upon his return from studying abroad. But Boon apparently did not take that into account either—thus things go south for other reasons. The kitchen-sink comedy turns into a paranoid thriller, and, somewhere along that bend, Boon decides that the Parks are not bubble-wrapped buffoons but passive predators. The Kims, therefore, emerge as righteous victims. When their modest apartment floods in a tempest that nary dampens the Parks, the crapper spouts off like a rectal geyser. This is a visual corollary to shit hitting the fan—and an illustration of Boon’s tonal breakdown.

For what it’s worth, I don’t get the sense that Boon is a facile, bandwagon populist. But though the director may be politically aligned with someone like Elizabeth Warren, Parasite is less interested in fixing the system than yelling about it. While the titular metaphor is exceedingly clever, how can one take the Kims’ radicalization seriously when its impetus has very little to do with reality? Is being punished for ignorance justice? It’s an excellent question. But, even if the film takes aim at an admirably complex range of problems, it undercuts its own authority by narrowing them into a single target. When the Parks’ patriarch (Lee Sun-kyun) exposes his prejudice with a slur, Boon’s ambiguity may be less elastic than he thinks.

In truth, asserting that income inequality exists is inadequate proof that the rich are monsters. Because audiences intuit the latter, and intuit that this filmmaker feels that in his gut, his movie is being recognized for speaking to our moment without having much cogent to say.