I first heard of the film Parasite sometime last year while aimlessly scrolling through Twitter. I had never heard of it before and was surprised to see so many people talking and raving about the film. Very early on I told myself that I needed to see this movie, but was disappointed to see that it wasn't even in theaters yet. Most of the talk around Parasite came from the Cannes Film Festival in May of 2019, so it didn't come to theaters for a while. For a couple of months, I had tried my very best to avoid all spoilers and wait until I could watch the film until my patience ran out in November. All it took was a quick google search, and I had the full movie with English subtitles and a not so HD quality and finally got to watch the movie.
...The people on Twitter were right, the movie was amazing, though the word amazing doesn’t give it enough credit. I don’t think a single movie has made me think so much. Months after I had watched the movie, I was still thinking about it and analyzing everything. If I were to simply explain the movie, I would say it's just about a poor family working for a rich family, but there is so much more to the plot. Bong Joon-ho, director of Parasite, is not new to his commentary on capitalism and class. Some of his previous movies, like Okja and Snowpiercer, discuss things like capitalism, animal cruelty, and class struggle.
One of the best examples of class struggle in Parasite is the contrast between the poor family and the rich family when it starts pouring down rain. The rich family was out on a camping trip, where they were disappointed to cancel their plans due to the rain. They drove their car back to their fancy mansion, calling on the poor family to fix them dinner and complaining about their situation. The rain only affected their plans and nothing else but was disastrous for the poor family. They lived in a half basement where they could barely see outside and once the rain started coming, their house and most of the surrounding houses were completed flooded and they lost their house. The constant between the families shows that the rich are often unaffected by things that can be devastating to the poor. They complained about canceling a trip, while others lost their homes. There are a lot of other similar contrasts in the film, but this is the one that stood out to me the most and was the most obvious.
A lot of people also used Parasite to explain and relate to things happening in real life, which is part of what made the film so successful. It is a film that many people can relate to, making it more appealing to the audience. An example of this is when Covid-19 first happened and a lot of rich celebrities were seen complaining about being stuck at home. Everybody can be frustrated in this situation, but they just came off as very ignorant. Sitting in their Beverly Hills mansion, they failed to acknowledge the struggling lower class as well as the frontline workers and those who didn't even have homes. As shown in Parasite, the very rich are often very ignorant of the others around them. During the climax of the film, the best example of this ignorance was shown. The rich family ignored the literal stabbing of the poor girl because their son had fainted. They asked the poor father for the car keys, not even acknowledging that his daughter was dying, so they could rush their son to the hospital. They just saw the situation through their perspective and weren't willing to care about the death of another person because they were too self-absorbed.
There is much more to the film than what I talked about, including the actors, production, music, and plot. It was a very successful movie, winning four Oscars, including Best Picture. I watched the Oscars for the first time back in February and honestly didn't know if it was going to win, but was very happy to see that a foreign-language film was being recognized by the Oscars.
