Because this movie is making the rounds in the awards season as of this writing (Jan 5), I thought it’d be worth writing a little bit about first impressions. The film had a big whisper campaign and limited release way back in October. A lot of friendly critics were calling this the best movie of the year while also helpfully keeping the twists hidden for our viewing enjoyment. I saw Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 entry) way back when and thought it was just meh. Fell into a category of overhyped sci-fi along with Tom Hiddleston’s performance in the adaptation of Highrise (May 2016) or Colin Farrell’s in The Lobster, which came out the exact same day and won the Cannes Jury Prize.
At the time, we were good little schoolboys and avoided all spoilers. There were some delightful memes of people who avoided learning anything about the movie so much so that they left the movie half way through because they were learning too much about the movie. The trailer, if you insist, is kind of a thing of beauty, builds suspense without giving literally anything away. In fact, it has some excellent deceptions in it.
That’s the slow roll up to the actual discussion of the film, which I’m still pretty ambivalent about. I like the variety of social horror that we’ve been seeing in the last few years: the way that Guillermo del Toro and Jordan Peele can find themselves in the same discussions on the internet and cast a wider net for their audiences, but I’m not entirely sure that this plot is fresh and original. In some ways it feels recycled and recently so. I’m willing to conclude parallel discovery on this one and give credit where credit is due to different directors seeing their visions through in different ways, but I think I need to read more deeply about the things that sets this apart.
Some reasons why I wasn’t quite satisfied. 1) I am generally allergic to the hypebeast. Massive marketing campaigns kill the fun for me as much as they do for anyone who fears trailer fatigue. I don’t like having my expectations artificially heightened for a non-franchise I’m not personally invested in, and sometimes (rightly or wrongly) my kneejerk reaction is to lash out against a thing that people, even a small group of elite critics, like. I think I’ve said before that for critics and us, it sometimes holds true that “new and different” can substitute for “well done” or “fully-formed,” and I’m wary of walking into that trap for foreign films especially.
My expectation for this movie was basically that there appears to be a young man who has found a way to dupe a rich family into paying him money to maybe or maybe not teach their young teenage daughter English. It felt like there was a possibility that the “twist” everyone kept talking about could be an over-the-top sci-fi/horror trope like an actual parasite that would lead to a lot of blood and gore, but it seemed just as likely from the trailer that someone would stab someone else over a pizza (???) maybe?
2) I think there are some important ways in which the plots of Us and Parasite are too tightly entangled for me to be able to separate them in my mind. Both are (spoilers) about a group of people that live underground (which, by the way, is the kind of twist that seems so improbable and unanticipated as to be sci-fi or magical realism); they’re both deeply interested in wealth disparity and pit different classes against one another in violent ways; they’re both variations on home invasion movies. Maybe Parasite was simply the victim of arriving second on the parallel discovery track, but it was a little disheartening to see people Christopher Columbusing this type of story not eight months after Jordan Peele had told a similar story with very similar visuals.
Friend says that the difference is that Jordan Peele’s Us jumped the shark and this movie was much more grounded, modest in its ambition. The comedy of Parasite is metatheatric: the rehearsal of lines (with the father, with the song that the sister sings: “Jessica, only child, Illinois, Chicago”), the effortlessness of lies, the performance of cool authority (the art teacher’s critique of a son’s painting). The script is slower, more inward-gazing, spends less time trying to span across the nation and more time reveling in the cleverness of one family’s persistence, their hustle, their ruse. The use of English is has the effect of making each instance into a catch phrase, quotable. And because they’re so sparse, they carry the weight of both thoughtful sententiae and one-liners.
Our protagonists are sympathetic and detestable all at once. The film delights in the hoodwinking of clueless, gullible wealthy while also contemplating the family’s actions and their negative impact on the former staff. The twist is good and throws the centrifugal force of the story off. We aren’t quite sure how or if the family will resort to murder. But there are loose strings that are either interesting or unsatisfying. What would have happened if the family had simply refused the housekeeper on that rainy night? What’s the point of that kindness turning into a kind of curse? Their kindness leads to a discovery of the depth of their deviousness, the shadow cast by their greed (Wife says). It underlines the problem of neighborlessness–and poses the question of whether they were always doomed to instability. What of the philosopher’s stone?
Some of the absurdist humor is simple but very pleasurable, like the multiplying of dogs in the first interview scene. The children of the poor family do an excellent job of expressing the metaphor of the millennial feeling of “imposter syndrome” in a way that resonates in different ways to other films from this year, like Yesterday (as metaphor), The Favourite (where generational strife plays a more subtle role), Wild Rose, or Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
