Bong Joon-ho’s satirical invasion-of-the-lifestyle-snatchers movie is cruel, ingenious and positively hums with malice
Bong Joon-ho’s climactic Oscar triumph in February with his scabrous satire Parasite seems now like something from another era. It was maybe the film world’s last happy international event and talking-point before the industry was plunged into lockdown, chaos and a fearful sense that things might never be the same again. But the spectacular success of Parasite brought a welcome revival on UK streaming services of so much of this director’s great back catalogue, including his remarkable Memories of Murder from 2003, based on South Korea’s then unsolved Hwaseong serial murders of the late 1980s – the film sparked an upsurge of interest in the case, and led finally to the culprit’s identification in 2019. Parasite continues to exert a grip, and even had the distinction of getting a luxury-connoisseur black-and-white version released. That was certainly an intriguing new slant, though in my view not as good as the richly and densely coloured original.
Parasite, in all its cruelty and ingenuity, actually seems even more claustrophobically appropriate to our new world of hunkering down uneasily together with our families, and forming bubbles with other households, or perhaps transgressing, going into bubbles where we have no business and disobeying physical distancing rules. Perhaps the film is fundamentally about precisely this – the abolition of distancing rules, a world in which the underclass are cramped together and then get up close and personal with the overclass. It’s a film whose satirical reflex extends to a vision of South and North Korea living together in paranoid, resentful intimacy.
