Parasite (2019) Review: A Violent Collision of Two Worlds Seen through the Eyes of Bong’s Camera

Directed by Bong Joon-ho, Parasite (2019) is a Korean dark comedy drama that masterfully exposes the reality of class division, following two families whose worlds violently collide as one infiltrates the life of the other. Apart from telling the story of the two families through the movie’s plot, Bong uses the visual architecture of the movie and beautiful camera movements to emphasise the contrasting worlds of the families.

Parasite starts as a light-hearted comedy. We’re introduced to the Kim family and their life in a crammed semi-basement (banjiha) in Seoul. The family earns a living assembling pizza boxes for a delivery company. Bong shows us the Kims as they welcome “free extermination” through their window while a passing exterminator is fumigating the street. The camera follows their struggles to catch WiFi signal from their bathroom, leeching internet from the neighboring café. Their life is anything but easy, yet we can’t resist to smile at their crammed little life.

The sense of crammedness in the semi-basement, together with the family’s closeness, is magnified as the camera captures the Kims together in a single shot on multiple occassions. One of the family members is usually squeezing out of the frame. In many of these shots, the camera movement is slow, gradually making the visual space of the movie seem smaller and smaller. The slow camera motions also create a sense of progression: whenever the camera is slowly zooming in on one of the characters, it is usually a sign of an important plot point set in motion.

The family’s fortune changes when the son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik), lands a job as an English tutor for the teenage daughter of the wealthy Park family.

The contrast between the Parks and the Kim family is immediately captured by the difference between the crammed semi-basement of the Kim family and the spacious Park house designed by a famous Korean architect. The visual space of the camera, too, becomes spacious, with members of the Park rarely seen together in a single frame.

Seeing how easily Ki-woo infiltrated the Park household, the Kim family schemes to get each family member a job with the Parks, seizing the jobs of Parks’ current employees. When the Parks go to a camping trip, we see the Kim family exactly half-way through the movie comfortably drinking in the living room of the Park house.

The tone is still light-hearted. The Kim family laughs, we laugh. The audience is inclined to supports them in their scheme, with little incentive given to the viewer to consider how the Kim family’s actions are impacting the Parks. Only the father, Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), voices empathy for the Park family by saying that, despite being rich, they are still nice — a statement that is instantly rebutted by his wife, Chung-Sook (Jang Hye-jin), suggesting that she would be nice, too, if she were rich.

Lightning strikes as the scene unfolds mid-way through the movie. This marks the moment when the light-hearted tone starts transitioning toward a harsher, grimm tone brought by the unexpected appearance of the Parks’ old housekeeper. This is also the moment when the slow camera movements are minimized, letting the characters carry the progression of the plot.

Bong doesn’t hold back in showing the audience the disturbing reality of inequality by portraying the contrasting perspectives of the Park and Kim family, as well as the violent collision of their worlds. His visual language expresses this inequality by creating visual contrasts between the Kims and the Parks that reflect the their different lives.

Neither does Bong hold back from portraying the unpredictability of human nature and life, which spared neither the Parks nor the Kims in one of the movie’s final scenes, the birthday of the Park’s son, Da-Song (Jung Hyeon-jun), where the worlds of the two families break down.

Parasite is filled with detailed symbolism that alludes to the Kims’ parasitic traits, as well as metaphors that tell us subtle stories of inequality. Paired with Bong’s brilliant visual architecture, the movie’s themes are delivered in a most foreboding, beautiful way.