Movie Monday: Parasite

Awards season is coming up soon, so naturally, I have already started watching the movies that have been getting a lot of awards hype. 

One of those is Bong Joon-ho’s newest movie, Parasite. 

It won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and has just been accumulating rave reviews and critical acclaims in the months leading up to the US release. I have liked Bong Joon-ho’s previous work like Snowpiercer and Okja, and I was excited about his new movie despite not knowing anything about it. The movie’s plot was kept a secret and you would find out what it was about once you actually saw it. 

That was what happened to me. 

I ditched all of my university work in the middle of the night to watch this movie, and I had high expectations and they were met and exceeded. 

The one thing I can say about the plot of this movie is that it follows the Kim family, who live in poverty in South Korea and are trying to make ends meet in any way they can. There are a lot of dark twists that follow the family once they make the decision to try to better their living situation. 

That’s it, it’s all I’m going to say so watch the movie if you really want to know what it’s about. 

This movie is a masterpiece worthy of every single award and critical acclaim it has received and I really hope it makes it to the Oscars and wins every single golden statuette that it’s nominated for. Personally, I hope it wins for Best Foreign Film. However, I wish Parasite is like last year’s Roma, which was nominated in every other major category and won most of those awards. I think Parasite easily deserves an Original Screenplay, Director, and Acting recognition. Since the movie mostly takes place in one place, and it could not be interesting and get old pretty fast. But the directing makes the house look massive and never-ending, and it is perfection. What’s even better, is that all of the sets were built specifically for the movie and it wasn’t filmed in a studio, like most of them are. I think that’s why it deserves recognition for the Directing and Production Design as well. Any gold that it ends up winning will make me happy. 

There are a lot of underlying messages in this movie, most about the class divide that is seen in South Korea. How what divides a country is not a wall, but how much wealth they have and how high in society they are. It’s a very interesting topic. However, the one thing that stood out to me the most is how all the characters are grey and there isn’t any definitive good or bad. Many movies can’t pull it off and this one did it perfectly, and it makes you think so much about it, as well as trying to figure out who is the parasite and what does that mean…

I realize that this review is incredibly vague and just me rambling about how perfect this movie is. It’s one that everyone should check out because it is completely worth it. I got blocked on Twitter for defending this movie’s honor, so trust me when I say it’s good. 

• foreign film
• horror
• movie monday
• Parasite
• UPR
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