[8.3/10] *Parasite* wears its themes on its sleeve. The divide between rich and poor, between the class that has to scrape and scrap to make ends meet, and the kind that blithely lives in largesse, is made massive and eventually deadly. In the film, the wealthy have the privilege of remaining oblivious to it all, while the underclass must con and fake and fight off one another for a small cut of what their social superiors squander without thinking.

Those themes give ballast to what is otherwise an amusing, twisty, thriller of a film. Separate and apart from the class conscious themes, *Parasite* is an engaging movie through the premise of one poor, desperate family ingratiating and insinuating themselves into the lives of a wealthy, complacent one. Director Bong Joon-Ho crafts tension in how far the Kim family will take this ruse, and how long they’ll be able to make it last, before it all comes tumbling down.

From there, *Parasite* simply escalates, going to stranger and more dangerous places as the film wears on. The reveal of a hidden bunker under the stairs, where the former housekeeper hid her loan shark-dodging husband, immediately ups the stakes. Until then, it’s a matter of the Kims slowly but surely pulling themselves out of their meager existence, and the entertaining craft of their schemes and scams to gradually infiltrate the ranks of “the help” for the Park family.

But afterwards, *Parasite*’s ambit becomes more and more outsized. The Kims have physical confrontations and mutual blackmail sessions with the old housekeeper and her husband. A bizarre episode of *Frasier* breaks out as the Kims try to hide their indulgence in the Parks’ excess, their bloody handiwork with their working class rivals, and themselves after the Parks unexpectedly return home. And an impromptu garden party becomes a scene of intra- and inter-class warfare, as combatants for the chance to live off the wealthy’s spare change square off, and the insults from being treated like appliances and class signifiers like one’s smell accumulate into a bloody end.

It’s all dark and funny and potent. The violence in the film has power because it’s largely muted and held back until the final reel. Joon-ho spends the bulk of the runtime letting the tension build, letting the audience wonder how far the Kims will let their scheme play out, whether they’ll be able to subdue their competitors, if they’ll evade detection from their benefactors, and when all this sneaking and resentment will boil over.

So when it does, when the rival breaks free and the final insult becomes too much to bear, the contrast between the polite deference and the angry blade, between the sharp young man doing whatever it takes to climb the ladder and the deranged basement dweller bent on vengeance, has a shock and a force to it.

That choice works in a film of contrasts. Joon-ho shows the Kims living in a semi-basement, riddled with “stink bugs” and pestered by random passersby using their alleyway as a public toilet. He depicts the housekeeper and her husband as scraping out an existence without light or air underneath the floorboards. And he depicts the Park household as one of wide-open spaces, of abundant food, protection from the elements and the fresh air and sunshine their less affluent counterparts are bereft of. The destitute are depicted as literally below those of a higher station. It comes through in how cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo and his team shoot the film, with impossibly vivid greens and brighter than bright sunshine coloring the world of the Parks, juxtaposed with the grungry dark and gray that inhabits the Kims’ home and environment.

The film centers itself on the irony of that. The key moment in the film is a deluge that wrecks one family’s life while proving a minor inconvenience to another’s. The rain floods the Kims’ home, destroying their possessions and forcing them to sleep in a gym, packing away the last few signs that the family patriarch was *somebody*.

All the while, the Parks don’t even understand. Their son pretends to be out in the elements, playacting as a native American who has to brave the raw weather on his own for fun. His parents literally get off to role plays about what it’s like to be the type of people they fire and disdain. The family smiles about the lack of pollution the rain caused and summon their servants for a frolic in the aftermath, safe from any blowback or life-changing consequences that their help is dealing with.

The old saying goes that it rains on the just and unjust alike. But in *Parasite*, who bears the brunt of that downpour, and who gets to remain blissfully ignorant of the hardships given the financial wherewithal that makes it a mere minor inconvenience, makes all the difference in the world.

There’s supreme, if not exactly subtle, commentary in that. Some of “the help” downright worship the wealthy family whose “grace” lets them lives on the margins of their luxury. The need to survive pits the members of the underclass against one another, ready to con and fight and even kill to maintain their small piece of the pie while their blasé benefactors live in unquestioned plenty. It turns people with talents -- in language, in art, in sport -- into people who strive only for that brand of comfort and security and the money necessary to attain it. It flattens us, changes us, debases us.

It’s a cheesy thing to say, but Joon-hoo asks who the real parasites are. At the beginning of the film, the Kims complain about the bugs infesting their tiny home. They are signifiers of how the upper class views the inhabitants of these places, as those sponging off the successes of those in higher rungs. But by the end, the tables have turned, as the same type of insect hovers around the dead body of the Park family patriarch. It suggests that he and his socialite cohort are the ones siphoning the labor, the talents, the lives of so many others who don’t have a fraction of what he and his family take for granted.

It’s a reality that the Parks can remain wilfully blind to, until the flash of steel and panic of a perfectly manicured garden is haunted by ghosts kept outside and below. *Parasite* spins an engrossing, comedic, and suspenseful yarn without that barely-submerged subtext. But the combination of story and theme gives the film a weight behind its thrills, a knowing glance behind its laughs, and a darkness beneath the bright images of success, punctured by those denied its fruits and necessities.