Not a Sequel to The Host

We finally got to see Parasite (2019). It's not that we've been holding off, although I did wonder just how gut-wrenching it would turn out to be. It's been at or near the top of my queue for months. But I now have between 10 ad 15 "Short Wait" or "Long Wait" movies at the top of my queue. And "Short Wait" seems to be "Never" in Netflix talk. Sometimes one or two will open up in the middle of the week, but Mon or Tues when Netflix sends my movies, no luck.

But somehow Parasite got loose. It Bong Joon Ho's story of the Kim family, a dad, mom, sister and daughter who live in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul. They are desperately searching for Wi-Fi, holding their phones in any corner of the apartment, since their phone service has been cut off. That's how low they have sunk. Then the son, who has failed his college entrance exams, gets a tip from a friend who got in to college. He's tutoring a rich girl, and wants the son to take over while he's on his term abroad. So he gets the daughter to dummy up some papers showing him as a college student and heads over to meet the Parks.

The Parks live in a gorgeous house with a serene garden. The mom is young, good-looking and kind of ditsy. The daughter he'll be tutoring is shy but seems romantically inclined. They have a young son who is wild - his mother is convinced he's an artistic genius. And the dad runs a software company. They also have a young driver and a matronly housekeeper.

Soon, the Kims have managed to get all their members into the Park household: The daughter as an art therapist for the boy, the father as driver, the mom as housekeeper. When the Parks go for a camping trip, they all spend the night in the mansion. And then it all starts to come apart.

I'll skip the twists, because you either know them or I would spoil them. I just want to say that this is much less of a horror film than I expected, although it has some blood and a body count. There is no fantasy element like in Get Out, or sci-fi like in The Host. But there sure is a lot of social commentary on the stratification of Korean society into the Have-Everythings and the Have-Nots.

The thing that I particularly noticed was how fluid the social boundaries seem. As poor as the Kims are, they are smart, skilled, and have little trouble fitting in with the Parks (at least as servants). All the skills they need, they pick up from a few YouTube videos - or Mr. Kim goes to a Mercedes dealer to get familiar with the car he's going to claim he has chauffeured for years. But as Mr. Park says, the Kims all have a certain smell - like boiled rags, like semi-basement apartments, and they can't get away from it.

I guess this won a ton of Oscars, including Best Picture - the only ever awarded for a non-English language film. Good for the Academy.