Parasite (2019) Movie Review

 

This movie tells the story of a down-on-their-luck family that takes a special interest in a very wealthy family everyone in this family is unemployed and slowly but surely they find a way to all get jobs working for this wealthy family in very private positions a driver a housekeeper a tutor and the whole time this other family has no idea that all these people are related and scamming them but when something rather unexpected happens it changes both of these families lives forever.

I think this movie was virtually flawless I loved every minute of the film it's extremely funny in essence it's a social satire because we're watching two very different families and how they perceive things the characters we follow who are sort of scamming these rich people literally live lower than the others they live farther down in the city when there's a rain storm the wealthy people think it's beautiful but for these guys they're thinking wrong. Where this film shines is that so much of this is told through visuals we get this great sequence where this family is trudging through a flood trying to get back to their home and we just have these incredible images playing out on the screen with beautiful breathtaking cinematography of the city and seeing how people from a certain area are looking at this rainstorm versus people who have to take buckets and get water out of their rooms through the window because their entire house is filling with sewage like in the opening sequence the family notices that their neighborhood is being fumigated for rodents and bugs and stuff and they leave the windows open because if all of this mist gets into their house they'll get free fumigation this movie is also extremely funny it's easily one of the funny guest movies I've seen so far this year and the humor is very smart and extremely clever and it's intelligent because it respects its characters they don't view the wealthy characters as complete idiots they're not also total villains either they don't necessarily do anything in the film that makes you hate them although eventually you begin to understand that members of this less fortunate family are starting to hate them and in a lot of films especially coming out of Hollywood less fortunate families are usually portrayed as imbeciles and this film though they're extremely smart because they have to be they don't have the resources of the wealthy family they don't have all of that and so they have to use their wits to scrounge and get money they're basically scavengers and to be a scavenger you have to be really smart so the film wisely takes its characters and plays against type for what you would expect from them to great results. There comes a point in the movie where the story shifts a little bit it starts to get less funny and a lot more serious and this point in the movie is what really hooked me it's all very realistic and portrayed in a way that you believe the things that are going on in this house are scary but they're scary because it seems plausible you can watch the movie and you can't really deny the possibility of something like that happening which is why it's a lot more frightening there's also a lot of brilliant visual connective tissue throughout the film that you can notice more on second and third viewings or maybe on the first if you're paying close attention that tell a story he uses very specific images in such a subtle way to make you understand everyone's plight and like so many of my favorite films this movie understands that certain things just need to be ambiguous you don't need to be told everything and sometimes you just have to look at someone's face and the expression they make to understand exactly how something makes them feel and in that moment you know why they do the things they do you don't necessarily justify their actions but what they're doing makes sense to you because you've gone on this journey with them.

Parasite is a beautiful movie wonderfully impeccably shot the musical score is also genius this is easily one of the best films of the year.