parasite in love movie review

Parasite in Love

Where to Watch

Kento Hayashi (Kengo Kosaka) Ryo Ishibashi (Yuichi) Arata Iura (Izumi) Nana Komatsu (Hijiri Sanagi)

Kensaku Kakimoto

A man named Kengo Kosaka is germaphobe, Due to his disorder, he is also a lonely young man. Meanwhile, high school student Hijiri Sanagi has Ommatophobia. Both Kengo Kosaka and Hijiri Sanagi do not expect to find love with another person.

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Parasites In Love (2021) review

Introduction

Kensaku Kakimoto might not be a name that many Japanese cinema lovers readily know, but those living in Japan have surely seen some of his commercial media on television. Yet, with Parasites In Love , based on Sugaru Miaki’s novel Koi Suru Kiseichu (2016), can make his name more well-known.

One day, Kengo Kosaka (Kento Hayashi), who suffers from mysophobia, is startled by the presence of a mysterious man in his apartment. The man, Izumi (Arata Iura), offers him a choice, either go to jail for being in the process of making a computer virus or look after a girl for two months for half a million yen.

The next day, at Mizushina park, he meets Hijiri Sanagi (Nana Komatsu), a girl suffering from scopophobia. Yet, due to his fear of being contaminated, their first meeting goes radically wrong. Despite this failure, Izumi keeps pressuring Kengo and demands him to find out why she refuses to go to school.

Parasites In Love is, in short, a unique romance narrative that does not only explore the possible logic of certain mental problems, but also succeeds in revealing, by introducing the fantastical presence of an infectious ill-making parasite, how a desire to cure can be highly problematic and render the benign doctor blind for what’s truly healing.

First things first, what does the narrative allows us to tell the logic of the symptoms? The logic of Kengo’s symptom is beautifully evoked through the medium of the image. The somewhat fantastical visual decorations subtly imply that the element of dirt could only attain its fearful status by becoming a signifier of death and the suicide of his parents. It is, thus, only by ridding himself of all dirt that Kengo can avoid the very confrontation with the traumatic Real of death.

Yet, this formulation is far from complete. The transformation of dirt into such traumatic signifier only happened because it incorporates the very responsibility Kengo subconsciously assumed in his parent’s suicide. What he tries to get rid of is thus not dirt or death as such, but also the very ‘deadly infection’ he himself is. The fear of death that hides in the signifier ‘dirt’ is thus not only a fear of the death that resides in others (i.e. the need to erase the deathly contamination that others spread by touching his things), but also a fear of dying due to his own dirty “sin” (i.e. the need to keep washing his hands) and a fear of killing others with his dirty “sin” (i.e. his fear of touching others or being touched by others) (Psycho-note 1).

Due his phobia, Kengo is marked by a subjective frustration and a deep discontent. His attempt to spread malware to ‘ infect ’ mobile machines, rendering couples unable to communicate, is solely driven by a certain need to enjoy destroying the pleasure couples have on Christmas Eve. His wish to take revenge on society is, in fact, nothing other than an expression of how tormenting his solitary confinement is. Yet, what Kengo aims to destroy is what he himself most desires: romantic happiness.

The logic of Hijiri Sanagi’s scopophobia is a bit more difficult to grasp as the onset of her symptom is not explicitly explored. Luckily, this narrative void does not mean we cannot analyze certain facets of her symptom. First, it should be clear that despite the prominence of the distorted shape of the eye it is not the eye as such that causes her anxiety. That what threatens to annihilate Hijiri as subject is the gaze of the Other (Psycho-note 2). The distorted eye is, in other words, merely the vehicle of this gaze, the signal that the Other’s threatening enjoyment lingers around her. To keep herself functioning, Hijiri cancels out the persecutory voice of the societal Other by wearing headphones and avoids, as much as possible, the encounter with others and the site where the Other’s gaze of enjoyment resides, i.e. the eyes.

Yet, how can we rhyme our reading of her symptom with Hijiri’s own explanation? In our view, her elaboration of the ‘bug inside my head’ has attained a subtle delusional flavour to not only make sense of her experience but also to keep herself, as subject, functioning within this ever-threatening societal Other. The story of an infectious bug residing in her head that feeds on other humans’ brain to grow (and ultimately kill her) has no other function that to explain why the Other wants to enjoy her. For Hijiri, the bug is a signifier that locates the object that the other wants to enjoy and that wants to enjoy the other (Narra-note 1). It is this vague delusion that drives her interest in all kinds of infections, like toxoplasmosis in rats, and parasites, like the diplozoon paradoxum.

Why does the encounter of Kengo with Hijiri have a healing effect on both? Why can Hijiri take of her headphones in his presence and Kengo take off is mask when she is around? Simply speaking, because they can form, for the first time in their life, a true connection with another subject and attain a sense of shared understanding. Yet, this increasingly romantic connection is only possible because Kengo appears before Hijiri as emptied from any kind of persecutory enjoyment – i.e. no enjoyment in his voice and no enjoying gaze resides in his eyes, and Hijiri appears before Kengo as a kind of dirt that he can live with – a kind of dirt disconnected from the Real of death and the dimension of his deathly desire.

Yet, the ‘factual’ presence of the ‘bug/parasite’ seemingly problematizes our analysis of the logic of Hijiri and Kengo’s symptom as well as our explanation as to why the formation of a connection between both is ‘healing’ for them. Even though the ‘parasite’ plays an important role in causing symptoms, rendering subjects unable to function within society, and seems to take control of its host to attract another parasite, one should not let oneself duped by the radical negative interpretation of the parasite by Hijiri’s grandfather and doctor Yuichi (Ryo Ishibashi). Parasites In Love beautifully implies that, in a certain way, the parasite is closely entangled with the element of love and that any attempt to eradicate this parasite, this love, can drive people to commit suicide (Psycho-note 3). Is it not the psychiatric desire to cure, to cut out a part of a person’s subjectivity and force them into a sort of a ‘mundane and loveless normality’ rather than the bug itself that is more destructive? Does Yuichi’s singular focus on curing not cause a radical effacing of the subjectivity of the ‘ill’ person in his ‘care’? And is the parasite not an integral part of our subjectivity (Psycho-note 4)?

As our short analysis reveals, Parasites In Love is far from a ‘straightforward’ romance narrative. Kakimoto does not only blend moments of drama, subtle lightheartedness, and touching romantic moments fluidly together, but does so in a way that the spectator is forced to question the usefulness of ‘biological’ approaches to mental health. By doing so, Kakimoto does not only deliver one of the most original romance narratives of the year, but also offers an inventive critique of the current tendencies in Japanese psychiatry. Yet, the narrative would have even been more satisfying if Kakimoto could have made the spectator feel the heartfelt emotions in the finale more deeply.

The composition of Parasites in Love , a balanced mix between static and dynamic moments, stands out due to its pleasant visual flow. This visual flow is not only function of Kakimoto’s sense of compositional rhythm, allowing him to give the visual unfolding of scenes a pleasing fluidity, but also due to his often-elegant shot-compositions and his smooth integration of visual decorations like slow-motion and fantastical visual elements to evoke what is difficult to vocalize or express. The visual flow of Parasites in Love is further enhanced by the fluid integration of musical accompaniment, while the visual pleasure of Kakimoto’s composition is heightened by its enticing colour-design.

Parasites in Love is, without a doubt, one of the most original romance narratives of the year. Kakimoto does not only please the spectator with his elegant composition and by crafting a heartwarming romance story, but also by offering a credible exploration of the logic of symptoms and a thought-provoking questioning of how we deal, as a society, with subject with mental problems.

Psycho-note 1: It is precisely because the repressed responsibility for his parent’s suicide underpins the signifier ‘dirt’ that relations malfunction. Each contact with the other echoes the very possibility of instigating the decay of the other’s body.

The fear of being contaminated by others is, in this respect, not only the sign of the death that marked the bodies of his deceased parents, but also projection of his own repressed filthy responsibility into the other. The difficulty he has with eating restaurant food is, as is beautifully visually implied, also closely linked the element of death.

Psycho-note 2: That it is the gaze that is problematic and not simply the eyes of others is also subtly underlined by the fact that her own eyes are also anxiety-inducing.

Psycho-note 3: In our view, the symptom Hijiri and Kengo is not simply caused by the parasite. In both cases, a lack of love can be assumed to have fed the parasite. In Hijiri’s case, her grandfather never ‘saw’ her as anything more than a carrier of the murderous parasite. And, in Kengo’s case, the suicide of his parents put the dimension of parental love radically into question.

Psycho-note 4: In our view, the parasite can also be understood as representing the Freudian unconscious as such. This unconscious is not only something that is intrinsically linked with out symptoms, but also something that ‘controls’ us beyond our consciousness.

Narra-note 1: Even if, at the mental institution, they talk about the presence of parasites who forces their hosts to commit suicide – a parasite that has also nested in Hijiri’s brain, her elaboration of the ‘bug’ still has a delusional element.

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‘Parasite in Love’: Pulpy drama has young love on the brain

Kengo (Kento Hayashi) is a man in step with the times. He never leaves his apartment without a face mask and gloves. When he comes home, he scrubs his hands furiously with soap and gets busy with the disinfectant.

Kengo meets his match when he crosses paths with Hijiri (Nana Komatsu), a high schooler who’s suffering from a debilitating case of scopophobia, the fear of being seen. She’s terrified of looking people in the eyes, and wears a chunky set of headphones to shut out the world.

She also has a fascination with parasites, which is a subject she knows intimately: There’s one of them lodged in her brain, and her scientist grandfather (Ryo Ishibashi) has told her it will send her to an early grave, just like her late mother. Kengo turns out to be afflicted with the same condition, which is how he ends up getting hired to keep an eye on Hijiri while she bunks off school.

After some initial friction, the pair resolve to attempt to reintegrate into society, finding that it’s easier with a fellow sufferer by their side. But as they also start to develop feelings for one another, the question lingers: Are their emotions genuine, or is it just the parasites controlling their behavior?

This intriguing premise gets lost under the artful surfaces of Kakimoto’s film, adapted from a light novel by Sugaru Miaki. It’s the kind of self-consciously stylish genre fare that I’ve come to associate with Netflix’s original Japanese programming: attractive, a little bit edgy but low on substance.

Maybe the streaming giant passed on this because it had already picked up Takashi Shimizu’s “Homunculus,” another pulpy drama with a neuroscience bent. “Parasite in Love” doesn’t have the same noxious undertow that Shimizu’s film did, but it’s only marginally more enjoyable.

The movie is as polished as you’d expect from a director with a background in commercials and music videos, yet Kakimoto struggles to find the right tone. He can’t seem to decide if he’s making a moody techno-thriller or an oneiric sci-fi romance in the vein of Spike Jonze’s “Her,” and comes out with an awkward mishmash of the two.

The visuals, attractively shot by Kateb Habib, have been color graded so that even the daylight scenes seem to be enveloped in gloom. It’s a stifling aesthetic, and the occasional bursts of vivid imagery — waking dreams, CGI close-ups of the parasites — leave the rest of the movie looking drab and claustrophobic by comparison.

Even the soundtrack, featuring a very on-trend selection of Japanese artists, is deployed in such a haphazard fashion that it tends to distract more often than it enhances the atmosphere.

Although the film ends with a satisfying flourish, it gets bogged down during a dialogue-heavy final act, and Hayashi and Komatsu never quite overcome their obvious lack of chemistry. “Parasite in Love” resonates unexpectedly with this peculiar moment in time, but it doesn’t rise to the occasion.

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Parasite in Love Movie Review: Exploration of melancholia and love

Rating: ( 2.5 / 5).

Loneliness is a compelling emotion to capture in cinema. This melancholic mood is depicted with a twist in the new Japanese Netflix film Parasite in Love . This adaptation of the novel of the same name by Sugaru Miaki is equal parts science fiction and philosophy.

Two lonely individuals—Kengo Kosaka (Hayashi Kento) and Hijiri Sanagi (Komatsu Nana)—who have chosen to disconnect from society find solace in each other’s company unexpectedly. Everything that causes them heartbreak and disappointment disappears in the face of each other’s company, but they learn, to their disappointment, that their feelings are not their doing. It is the result of a parasite that lives in their head!

Director: Kensaku Kakimoto Cast: Hayashi Kento, Komatsu Nana Streaming on: Netflix Language: Japanese

You see, Kengo suffers from extreme mysophobia that forces him to repeatedly wash and scrub his hands. He stays away from everyone and is a true hermit, preferring to stay in solitude, and finding peace and comfort in his space.

On the other hand, Hijiri suffers from scopophobia, a condition that causes her fear of being stared at. She tunes people out and uses music to armour herself. Slowly, the film familiarises you with their struggle, the discomfort, and the ensuing isolation. And then, of course, they cross paths…

The disruption in Kengo’s world is portrayed with electric music. Hijiri disrupts his otherwise peaceful life and breaks through all the boundaries that he has taken time and effort to put in place. The disruption soon turns into a meditative trance. This attraction is influenced by a ‘worm’ that lives in their head. Hijiri’s mother Maya also had this ‘worm’ before she died by suicide and Hijiri’s grandfather Yuichi has instilled this belief in her that the worm caused her mother’s death in the past. As I said, there’s quite a bit of science-fiction at play here.

Parasite in Love is slow-paced and takes its time to get you used to the idea of a worm’s existence in a person’s head. The film is dialogue-heavy, and it does come in the way of the film’s efficiency. The end interaction between Kengo and Hijiri, for perhaps this reason, does not quite create the desired impact.

Also, the last act loses direction because of the haphazard use of background scores. In the beginning, the sudden music interruptions make sense, as they symbolise disruption, but as the plot unravels, it feels quite arbitrary.

However, the color-graded visuals by Kateb Habib do a great job of communicating the film’s mood. Even in love, Kengo and Hijiri continue to express how suffocating the feeling can be, and these craft choices come in handy to reflect that. In a nutshell, the film is the manifestation of one of John Steinbeck’s most-popular lines: “All great and precious things are lonely.”

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Parasite in Love

A man named Kengo Kosaka is germaphobe, Due to his disorder, he is also a lonely young man. Meanwhile, high school student Hijiri Sanagi has Ommatophobia. Both Kengo Kosaka and Hijiri Sanagi... Read all A man named Kengo Kosaka is germaphobe, Due to his disorder, he is also a lonely young man. Meanwhile, high school student Hijiri Sanagi has Ommatophobia. Both Kengo Kosaka and Hijiri Sanagi do not expect to find love with another person. A man named Kengo Kosaka is germaphobe, Due to his disorder, he is also a lonely young man. Meanwhile, high school student Hijiri Sanagi has Ommatophobia. Both Kengo Kosaka and Hijiri Sanagi do not expect to find love with another person.

• Kensaku Kakimoto
• Sugaru Miaki
• Yukiko Yamamuro
• Kento Hayashi
• Ryo Ishibashi
• 1 User review
• 6 Critic reviews
• 1 nomination

• Kengo Kosaka

• Hijiri Sanagi
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Kengo Kosaka : Why is this world keeping me alive?

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• Iori_Vivisan
• Mar 16, 2022
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• November 12, 2021 (Japan)
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• Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes

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Parasite in love.

Directed by Kensaku Kakimoto

A man named Kengo Kosaka is germaphobe, Due to his disorder, he is also a lonely young man. Meanwhile, high school student Hijiri Sanagi has Ommatophobia. Both Kengo Kosaka and Hijiri Sanagi do not expect to find love with another person.

Kento Hayashi Nana Komatsu Arata Iura Ryo Ishibashi

Director Director

Kensaku Kakimoto

Writer Writer

Yukiko Yamamuro

Original Writer Original Writer

Sugaru Miaki

Editor Editor

Yoshitaka Honda

Alternative Titles

Koi Suru Kiseichu, Love Parasites, ปรสิตมีรัก, Koisuru Kiseichuu, 恋爱寄生虫, Ký Sinh Trùng Đang yêu, 사랑하는 기생충, 戀愛寄生蟲, შეყვარებული პარაზიტი

Drama Romance

Releases by Date

12 nov 2021, 16 jan 2024, releases by country.

• Theatrical G

South Korea

• Theatrical 12

100 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by ri🚬 ★★★ 1

"she's not even my type" wdym thats literally nana komatsu.

Review by alanis ★★★½

𐙚 i absolutely loved the analogy between the worms and mental disorders ♡ people with mental disorders often feel like they’re not normal, and just thinking about doing things that most people found common feels absurd and impossible, the main characters were just like that, but they managed to find comfort and motivation to step out of their comfort zones and in my opinion, that's what love is about.

this movie was a whole new experience; it had a lot of potential and was quite intriguing. i’ve seen some people criticize the ending, but personally, i really liked it, it's like a reminder that there's always hope if you search for it.

one thing that holds it back from being…

Review by Bruce Tetsuya ★★★★

A super unique and beautifully made movie about modern romance & the fear that the love we feel for others is only a byproduct of a sickness.

Without spoiling too much, I'd definitely recommend going into this one as blind as you can, aside from maybe reading the synopsis.

A great blend of digital special effects and practical, the film is paced quite well, and feels like a really long music video, in the best way possible. I'll definitely be rewatching it soon.

Review by mika ★★

the things i do for you nana

Review by Ashlea💧🦎🐜 ★★★½

It doesn't know quite what it wants to be, but I think I'm in the minority of people who liked this so far. It's a unique exploration of mental illness, the toll it can have on your quality of life and the desire for connectedness and love. I don't typically get excited for Kento Hayashi to appear in films, but his mature and warm performance here won me over. He truly is the heart and soul of the film. It's nice to see some movies coming out of Asia lately about debilitating mental health conditions, and I think this would make a nice pairing with I WeirDO. Oh, and people need to add this film to their Christmas Watch Lists ;)

Review by nina

this proves i’d watch anything for nana komatsu

Review by grae ★★★½ 3

PANGET NG LALAKI AMPUTA pero ok lang ganda mo nana loveyuo

Review by YI T ★★★

The life during and after COVID-19.

Review by maria ★★

Which came first? The parasite or love?

Directed with lots of pizazz (what a word) and acted with heart by both leads, this wins points and the viewer's (this viewer's) interest before the actual plot kicks in. When the actual plot kicks in... it's just claptrap that tries to be allegoric and poetic but is mainly perfunctory. The ending is cute, though.

Review by Fraser Ross ★★½ 1

Fuckn hell nana komatsu will be 40 years old and still playing a high schooler

Review by Clariza ★★½

Watch this because of Nana Komatsu

Review by tristyn ★★

this is so icky why does she have to be in high school ????????

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'Parasite' Hooks You With Its Emotional Power And Extraordinary Cunning

Justin Chang

Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong play Mr. and Mrs. Park, a wealthy couple whose hired help isn't quite what it seems, in Bong Joon-ho's thriller Parasite . Courtesy of NEON CJ Entertainment hide caption

Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong play Mr. and Mrs. Park, a wealthy couple whose hired help isn't quite what it seems, in Bong Joon-ho's thriller Parasite .

I was fortunate enough to go into Parasite knowing almost nothing about it. Bong Joon-ho's brilliant new movie packs the kinds of stunning, multi-layered surprises that deserve to be experienced as fresh as possible. I'll tread as cautiously as I can, but suffice to say that Parasite is a darkly comic thriller about two families: the Parks, who are very rich, and the Kims, who are very poor.

Mr. and Mrs. Kim live with their son, Ki-woo, and their daughter, Ki-jung, in a cramped apartment in Seoul. Years of poverty have made them shrewd, resilient and tough — and not above the occasional petty theft. Like the family in last year's great Japanese drama Shoplifters , they've managed to survive by relying on their wits and on each other.

One day Ki-woo, a high-school graduate, gets a job as an English tutor for an upper-class teenage girl named Da-hye. Her father, Mr. Park, is a millionaire tech titan, and they live in a gated modernist fortress of a house designed by a famous architect.

Ki-woo begins visiting the house to give his English lessons, and it's there that he meets Mrs. Park, who lets slip that she's looking for an art teacher for her mischief-making young son. Thinking fast, Ki-woo mentions a distant acquaintance who might be good for the job — and within days, his sister Ki-jung has been hired as a very expensive tutor.

The Kims enjoy their sudden boost in income, even as they strain to keep the Parks in the dark about their family connection and their lack of proper credentials. But the lies don't end there, and their scheme grows only more dangerous in its ambition.

For roughly its first hour, Parasite is the most deviously entertaining con-artist thriller I've seen in years. Director Bong pulls the pieces together with the elegance and flair of a conductor attacking a great symphony. Inch by inch, the Kims expand their domain. No piece of information, whether it's the matter of the housekeeper's allergy or the sexual habits of Mr. Park's driver, is too trivial to be used to their advantage.

From Korea, A Thriller Hitchcock Would Admire

Bong Joon-Ho's 'Okja' Is As Weird A Hybrid As Its Porcine Star

Bong draws us into a wicked sense of complicity with the Kims, who, for all their duplicity, are never hard to root for. But as fun as it is to see the Parks get hoodwinked, Bong doesn't turn them into easy villains. We see how gullible and vulnerable they are behind their bolted doors and high-tech security system. We see the cracks in their perfect-family facade: The actress Cho Yeo-jeong gives an especially nuanced performance as Mrs. Park, who, for all her breezy entitlement, lives in the shadow of her cold, unfeeling husband.

The Kims, by contrast, are a model of intimacy and fairness: When money and space are this tight, everyone has to pull their weight. They depend on each other so completely that they seem to function less like individuals than like a single organism. Maybe that makes them the "parasite" of the title, or maybe not. As the movie races toward a suspenseful and terrifying conclusion, it leaves little doubt as to whether the haves or the have-nots represent the greater scourge in a capitalist society.

Bong has always been deft at synthesizing thrills and politics. He previously tackled class warfare in his English-language thriller Snowpiercer , but Parasite feels even more closely related to his wonderful 2006 monster movie The Host , which also followed a desperate family trying to survive. The star of The Host was the popular actor Song Kang-ho, who returns in Parasite as Mr. Kim and gradually becomes the movie's angry moral center. More than his wife or kids, he understands what it means to be looked down on by people like the Parks and regarded as less than human.

At first you're right there with the Kims, until the story takes the first of many jaw-dropping turns. Parasite is seamless in the way it shuffles moods, tones and genres, and downright Hitchcockian in the way it manipulates your sympathies. It's a movie of extraordinary cunning and devastating emotional power, and after three viewings I'm still not sure quite how to classify it. Is it a comedy or a tragedy, a thriller or a satire, an art film or a popular entertainment? Maybe it's best to simply call it what it is: a masterpiece.

Correction Oct. 24, 2019

An earlier photo caption misstated Lee Sun-kyun's name as Sun Kyun-lee.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

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It’s so clichéd at this point in the critical conversation during the hot take season of festivals to say, “You’ve never seen a movie quite like X.” Such a statement has become overused to such a degree that it’s impossible to be taken seriously, like how too many major new movies are gifted the m-word: masterpiece. So how do critics convey when a film truly is unexpectedly, brilliantly unpredictable in ways that feel revelatory? And what do we do when we see an actual “masterpiece” in this era of critics crying wolf? Especially one with so many twists and turns that the best writing about it will be long after spoiler warnings aren’t needed? I’ll do my best because Bong Joon-ho ’s “Parasite” is unquestionably one of the best films of the year. Just trust me on this one.

Bong has made several films about class (including " Snowpiercer " and " Okja "), but “Parasite” may be his most daring examination of the structural inequity that has come to define the world. It is a tonal juggling act that first feels like a satire—a comedy of manners that bounces a group of lovable con artists off a very wealthy family of awkward eccentrics. And then Bong takes a hard right turn that asks us what we’re watching and sends us hurtling to bloodshed. Can the poor really just step into the world of the rich? The second half of “Parasite” is one of the most daring things I’ve seen in years narratively. The film constantly threatens to come apart—to take one convoluted turn too many in ways that sink the project—but Bong holds it all together, and the result is breathtaking.

Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) and his family live on the edge of poverty. They fold pizza boxes for a delivery company to make some cash, steal wi-fi from the coffee shop nearby, and leave the windows open when the neighborhood is being fumigated to deal with their own infestation. Kim Ki-woo’s life changes when a friend offers to recommend him as an English tutor for a girl he’s been working with as the friend has to go out of the country for a while. The friend is in love with the young girl and doesn’t want another tutor “slavering” over her. Why he trusts Kim Ki-woo given what we know and learn about him is a valid question.

The young man changes his name to Kevin and begins tutoring Park Da-hye (Jung Ziso), who immediately falls for him, of course. Kevin has a much deeper plan. He’s going to get his whole family into this house. He quickly convinces the mother Yeon-kyo, the excellent Jo Yeo-jeong, that the son of the house needs an art tutor, which allows Kevin’s sister “Jessica” ( Park So-dam ) to enter the picture. Before long, mom and dad are in the Park house too, and it seems like everything is going perfectly for the Kim family. The Parks seem to be happy too. And then everything changes.

The script for “Parasite” will get a ton of attention as it’s one of those clever twisting and turning tales for which the screenwriter gets the most credit (Bong and Han Jin-won , in this case), but this is very much an exercise in visual language that reaffirms Bong as a master. Working with the incredible cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong (“ Burning ,” “Snowpiercer”) and an A-list design team, Bong's film is captivating with every single composition. The clean, empty spaces of the Park home contrasted against the tight quarters of the Kim living arrangement isn’t just symbolic, it’s visually stimulating without ever calling attention to itself. And there’s a reason the Kim apartment is halfway underground—they’re caught between worlds, stuck in the growing chasm between the haves and the have nots.

"Parasite" is a marvelously entertaining film in terms of narrative, but there’s also so much going on underneath about how the rich use the poor to survive in ways that I can’t completely spoil here (the best writing about this movie will likely come after it’s released). Suffice to say, the wealthy in any country survive on the labor of the poor, whether it’s the housekeepers, tutors, and drivers they employ, or something much darker. Kim's family will be reminded of that chasm and the cruelty of inequity in ways you couldn’t possibly predict. 

The social commentary of "Parasite" leads to chaos, but it never feels like a didactic message movie. It is somehow, and I’m still not even really sure how, both joyous and depressing at the same time. Stick with me here. "Parasite" is so perfectly calibrated that there’s joy to be had in just experiencing every confident frame of it, but then that’s tempered by thinking about what Bong is unpacking here and saying about society, especially with the perfect, absolutely haunting final scenes. It’s a conversation starter in ways we only get a few times a year, and further reminder that Bong Joon-ho is one of the best filmmakers working today. You’ve never seen a movie quite like “Parasite.” Dammit. I tried to avoid it. This time it's true.

This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7th.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Parasite (2019)

132 minutes

Song Kang-Ho as Kim Ki-taek

Lee Sun-Kyun as Park Dong-ik

Cho Yeo-jeong as Yeon-kyo ( Mr. Park's wife )

Choi Woo-shik as Ki-woo ( Ki-taek's son )

Park So-dam as Ki-jung ( Ki-taek's daughter )

Lee Jung-eun as Moon-gwang

Chang Hyae-jin as Chung-sook ( Ki-taek's wife )

• Bong Joon-ho

Director of Photography

• Hong Kyung-pyo

Original Music Composer

• Jung Jae-il
• Yang Jin-mo
• Han Jin-won

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Review: Thrilling and devastating, ‘Parasite’ is one of the year’s very best movies

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The first thing you see in Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” a thriller of extraordinary cunning and emotional force, is an upper window in a tiny underground apartment. From this high, narrow vantage the Kims, a resilient family of four, peer onto a grubby Seoul street strewn with garbage bags and electrical wires — an ugly view made worse by a drunk who often turns up to relieve himself right outside. Sometime later the Kims will stand before a much larger window, as big and beautiful as a cinema screen, in an enormous house with a gorgeous sunlit garden. It’s not just a different view; it’s a different world.

From the outset of this deviously entertaining movie, which recently became the first South Korean film to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes, every detail of the Kims’ hardscrabble existence is on blunt display. In an early scene, high school graduate Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik) and his sister, Ki-jung (Park So Dam), scurry around their cramped bathroom with their phones held aloft, hunting for a free Wi-Fi signal. You register the clutter of their apartment with its discarded clothes, mildewed tiles and skittering stinkbugs. You watch the Kims fold and assemble pizza boxes for a nearby restaurant, the closest any of them has recently come to landing a job.

But you also notice the close bonds between brother and sister, as well as the easy rapport they share with their boisterous father, Ki-taek (Song Kang Ho), and sharp-witted mother, Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin). Living together in close quarters has bred in them a matter-of-fact intimacy and a wily self-sufficiency.

Bong has never been one to ennoble or romanticize his characters’ poverty, but he does invest them with a terrific rooting interest. “Parasite,” with its tough, unsentimental view of people doing what they must to survive, initially suggests an evil twin to “Shoplifters,” Hirokazu Kore-eda’s lovely drama about a family of petty thieves (which, incidentally, won the Palme last year).

From ‘Knives Out’ to ‘Parasite’: Why movies are tackling income inequality and class warfare

In a range of fall releases, including “Joker,” “Parasite,” “Hustlers” and “Knives Out,” major movies take on issues of class and income inequality

Oct. 7, 2019

But the movie swiftly establishes its own unpredictable agenda not long after Ki-woo inherits an English tutoring job from a college-student friend (Park Seo Joon). The pupil in question is an upper-class teenage girl, Park Da-hye (Jung Ziso), and their lessons will take place in the gated modernist fortress she calls home. Ki-woo just barely manages to keep a lid on his awe the first time the Parks’ formidable housekeeper, Moon-gwang (Lee Jung Eun), ushers him inside. Designed and formerly inhabited by a famous architect, the house is a masterwork of real-estate pornography with its beige walls, marble floors and vast, cavernous spaces.

But it is also a warren of secrets, full of telling details that Bong, a superb storyteller and a master of camera movement, unwraps with elegance and economy. (The cinematography is by Hong Kyung Pyo.) He calls your attention to the toy arrows fired by Da-hye’s younger brother, Da-song (Jung Hyeon Jun), and also to a framed magazine article about her father, Dong-ik (Lee Sun Kyun), a millionaire tech titan. But no one embodies the family’s glossy pretensions more nakedly than Dong-ik’s wife, Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo Jeong), whether she’s idly stroking one of the family’s three dogs or peppering her everyday speech with English affectations.

Yeon-kyo’s breezy entitlement hides a naive, nervous streak, and Cho’s performance suggests just how gullible and vulnerable the very rich can be behind their high-tech security systems. When Yeon-kyo lets drop that her mischief-making young son is in need of an art tutor, Ki-woo, thinking fast, suggests a distant acquaintance for the job — and, within days, has succeeded in installing his sister in the house as well. Ki-jung, the most intuitive grifter in a family full of them, shows up with a coolly professional demeanor and a mouth full of therapeutic gobbledygook. (She got it all from Google, she later announces to her family’s amusement.)

The Kims enjoy their sudden boost in income, but their ambitions — and the dramatic stakes — only escalate from there. I wouldn’t dream of disclosing the stunning, multilayered surprises that await you in “Parasite,” though it gives away nothing to note that it’s about two families on warring sides of the class divide. Certainly it says nothing about the dexterity with which Bong shuffles tones, moods and genres, or the Hitchcockian precision with which he and his co-writer, Han Jin Won, have booby-trapped their narrative. Taking cues from classics of domestic intrigue such as Kim Ki-young’s “The Housemaid” (1960) and Joseph Losey’s “The Servant” (1963), they send this domestic drama vaulting into satire, suspense, terror and full-blown tragedy.

The first hour or so of “Parasite” is simply the most dazzling movie about the joys of the con I’ve seen in years. It’s a heist thriller of the quotidian, in which no everyday object — a piece of fruit, a child’s drawing — is too trivial to be weaponized. Bong, his camera at once ecstatic and controlled, brings the pieces together with the brio of a conductor attacking a great symphony. But even as he lures us into a wicked sense of complicity with the Kims, he also suggests that they aren’t the only ones with something to hide.

As this allegory of class rage plays out, you may find yourself wondering about the exact meaning of the movie’s title. At first it seems the parasites must be the lowly Kims, who are so interdependent that they often seem less like individuals than members of a single, unified organism. (Watch the way they sometimes squat and crawl around in private, like stealthy four-legged insects — or perhaps just people accustomed to low ceilings.) But then, surely the title more truthfully describes the Parks, whose lives of extravagant luxury represent the real moral and financial scourge in a ruthless late-capitalist society.

Yet Bong refuses the crutch of an easy target. He peels back the layers of privilege to expose the tremendous sadness and patriarchal cruelty of the Park household, where Yeon-kyo lives in fear of her husband and instinctively prioritizes her son’s needs over her daughter’s. The Kims are a model of functionality and egalitarianism by comparison, and while they may covet their employers’ prosperity, there is never any real doubt here about which is the more loving, stable family unit.

Bong has never been one for uncomplicated heroes or easy villains: Think of the sympathetic grotesques Tilda Swinton played in “Snowpiercer” and “Okja,” the dystopian eco-thrillers the director made before this film. He has always had a knack for fusing genre pleasures and liberal polemics, as he did in his brilliant 2006 monster movie, “The Host.” With their cleverly linked titles and their shared star (Song, one of Korea’s best actors), “The Host” and “Parasite” feel like natural companion pieces, right down to the haunting echoes in their respective final shots: At heart, they’re both movies about downtrodden families doing what they must to survive in a cold, indifferent world.

What distinguishes “Parasite” even within Bong’s body of work is its discipline: This is a tighter, more intimately scaled picture than “Snowpiercer” and “Okja,” and it proceeds like clockwork without ever feeling airless or mechanical. That’s a tribute to the note-perfect ensemble, especially Park So Dam, Cho Yeo Jeong and the astonishing Lee Jeong Eun as three women driven to three unique states of desperation. But it’s also a tribute to a filmmaker whose understanding of the world is as persuasive in its cruelty as it is trenchant in its humanity. “Parasite” begins in exhilaration and ends in devastation, but the triumph of the movie is that it fully lives and breathes at every moment, even when you might find yourself struggling to exhale.

Best of the 2019 Toronto Film Festival: There was ‘Parasite’ and there was everything else

L.A. Times writers Glenn Whipp and Justin Chang discuss their Toronto festival highlights including “Marriage Story,” “Knives Out,” “Uncut Gems” and “The Lighthouse.”

Sept. 13, 2019

(In Korean with English subtitles) Rating: R, for language, some violence and sexual content Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes Playing: ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood, and the Landmark, West Los Angeles

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• DVD & Streaming
• Comedy , Drama , Mystery/Suspense

Content Caution

In Theaters

• November 8, 2019
• Song Kang-ho as Kim Ki-taek; Choi Woo-shik as Kim Ki-woo (Kevin); Park So-dam as Kim Ki-jeong (Jessie); Chang Hyae-jin as Kim Chung-sook; Lee Sun-kyun as Park Dong-ik; Cho Yeo-jeong as Park Yeon-gyo; Lee Jung-eun as Gook Moon-gwang; Park Myung-hoon as Geun-sae; Park Da-hye; Jung Hyeon-jun as Park Da-song

Home Release Date

• January 28, 2020
• Bong Joon Ho

Distributor

Movie review.

It started with a rock.

A special rock. A lucky rock. A so-called “scholar’s rock,” valued for its rugged, regal shape. It was a gift to Kim Ki-woo, a university-age (though not university-bound) guy who doesn’t have much use for a rock, but sure could use a little luck. He and his family live in a scrubby semi-basement in South Korea, four members of the country’s countless working poor.

Not that the Kims work, exactly. Not now. Not since Papa Kim’s businesses all went belly-up and jobs have been so hard to find. The four have been folding pizza boxes to make a little cash. And when the bug fumigators saunter by, Papa Kim insists on keeping the window open, to cut down on the semi-basement’s stinkbug population.

Kim Ki-woo’s friend, who gives him the rock, says the chunk of stone is supposed to shower wealth on whoever possesses it.

“This is so metaphorical,” Ki-Woo says. But then again, he says that about a lot of things.

Still, there may be something to that stony metaphor: When the friend brings the rock, he also brings a lead on a job. He’s been serving as an English tutor for Park Da-hye, the daughter of a powerful—and rich—CEO. It’s been a good gig, but the friend is leaving to study overseas. And he doesn’t want to turn Da-hye (whom he’s sweet on) over to some slavering college guy—even though being in college is, technically, a prerequisite for the job. Would Ki-Woo like to apply? He knows English, after all. All he needs is a forged paper or two. And Ki-woo’s sister, who has a great eye for art and subterfuge, can handle that .

Ki-woo agrees and has his talented sis (whom, her proud papa says, should really get a major from Oxford in forgery) whip up the necessary papers. Ki-woo doesn’t feel guilty at all. After all, he’s bound to get into university next year. “I just printed out the document a bit early.”

The interview goes quite well. And Ki-woo finds Da-hye, a sophomore in high school, quite cute. Da-hye’s mother gives him his first wad of money, dubs him with the English name Kevin and mentions that their young boy, Da-song, could sure use another art tutor. The kid’s been through plenty, but none stay longer than a month or so.

Kevin stews on that bit of information for, oh, about five seconds, when an idea pops into his head.

“Someone just came to mind,” he tells Mrs. Park. A friend of a cousin, he thinks. She’s studied in the United States—at prestigious Illinois State University, in fact. But she might be back in the country. But, Kevin thinks, his sister just might pull it off with this fabulously wealthy, incredibly naïve mom. Why, if they play their cards right, maybe the whole Kim family could wind up working for the Parks. And who knows what might happen after that?

Yep, that rock may be special after all.

Positive Elements

Many of the main players in Parasite are strangely sympathetic but deeply flawed. You’ll not find a real role model here. Still, it’s pretty obvious that the wealthy Parks and the hardscrabble Kims both love their families—though the ways love presents itself can be quite different.

Spiritual Elements

We hear a bit about the “lucky” rock. We also hear a passing reference to a local church (the “Love of God” church) that placed an important pizza order. Someone believes he sees a ghost.

Sexual Content

Mr. and Mrs. Park have sex on a couch. Frontal nudity is barely avoided in this explicit scene, but it’s very clear what’s going on. The couple moans and enters into pretty frank dialogue.

College-age Kevin and high-schooler Da-hye carry on a relationship. We see the romantic tension during their first lesson (when Kevin takes her wrist to feel her racing pulse). Later, during a tutoring session, they kiss. They share a lengthy smooch somewhat later, and Kevin says that he hopes to ask her to officially date him once she enters college. Kevin’s family jokes that they could soon be Da-hye’s in-laws. Da-hye gets jealous and possessive.

Someone removes a pair of panties to frame a chauffeur. We hear a great deal of conversation surrounding those panties, including some obscene comments.

Papa Kim squeezes his wife’s backside. A woman gives her husband a backrub. A man asks Mr. Park whether he loves his wife on a couple of occasions, and that same man gently touches Mrs. Park’s hand.

Violent Content

[ Spoiler Warning ] Several people are stabbed. Some of them die, and we see a great deal of blood. Someone is kicked down a flight of stairs and gets knocked unconscious. People are tied up and gagged. A person smashes another person’s head with a rock. A man pounds his head against something until it’s bleeding heavily. Someone is deathly allergic to peaches (a fact that’s exploited, much to the allergic person’s deep consternation). Someone else is prone to having epileptic-like seizures and fainting spells.

Crude or Profane Language

We har nearly 25 f-words, three s-words and a smattering of other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused four times, once with the word “d–n,” while Jesus’ name is abused once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The Kims get drunk on whiskey one evening, breaking glasses and bottles as the night wears on. They also drink beer together as a family. Kevin (then still known as Ki-woo) does some shots with his friend. While having sex, Mrs. Park begs for Mr. Park to buy her drugs.

Kevin’s sister smokes. We hear references to meth and cocaine.

Other Negative Elements

A huge rainstorm proves to be a minor inconvenience for the Parks, who live high on a hill. To the poor citizens of this South Korean city, though, it’s devastating. Many people who live in basement and semi-basement apartments are completely flooded out, and much of the flood water (we learn) is sewage. Some dark brown water spurts and shoots from a toilet; sometimes the lid is open, sometimes closed, but it’s seriously messy and gross.

The Parks often comment on how their servants smell. They’re appalled by the stench of poverty, apparently, particularly Mr. Park, who says that his chauffeur smells like a cooked turnip. The Parks’ revulsion at that smell, along with the insecurity that precipitates from it, runs throughout the movie.

People frequently urinate in front of the Kims’ home. At one point, Kevin tries to stop the man from doing so, and that leads to a weird liquid fight involving both water and urine.

The Kims—all of them—lie in order to further their station. They desperately try to hop on other people’s WiFi network. Da-song, the Park’s young boy, is supposed to have some indeterminate mental challenges. His sister thinks he’s lying.

Parasite has been the surprise of the 2019 cinematic awards season. This low-budget, South Korean mystery/thriller/comedy/tragedy has been scooping up all sorts of honors. In advance of the Academy Awards, it seems poised not just to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but potentially to be nominated in the Best Picture category as well.

And it is, certainly, a clever film, filled with sting-like schemes, moments of humor, cogent cultural satire and a couple of surprises.

It also contains a lot of really troubling behavior.

That is, of course, cooked into the story. You’re not necessarily supposed to like a lot of the people we meet—so the fact that we like so many of them in spite of themselves is a tribute to filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. The rich can treat the poor like non-humans. The poor can treat the rich with their own kind of contempt. Whatever warmth and hope we find here is buried under seriously troubling behavior. The film’s sex, violence and language would be enough to earn Parasite its R-rating, certainly. But even if it was as clean enough to slap on Disney+, the characters themselves, and their often self-destructive attitudes, would be enough to give many pause.

I understand Parasite’ s appeal. But sometimes the film, like the truly “metaphorical” stink bugs that we see early on, can crawl in the corners and smell something awful.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Love Lies Bleeding review – Kristen Stewart lifts brilliant bodybuilding noir

Violent story of extreme sport, forbidden love and a lot of murder could be a new grindhouse classic, but Stewart’s fierce subtlety pushes it up a level

B ritish film-maker Rose Glass lets rip with some pure roid-rage cinema in this uproarious, horribly violent and lethally smart noir thriller sited in the Venn diagram overlap between bodybuilding, murder and sex. The bodycount climbs so alarmingly that the characters are in danger of running out of rugs to roll the corpses up in.

Glass has assembled a great cast – but first among equals has to be Kristen Stewart who gives an excellent performance as gym manager and twitchy nicotine addict Lou, embroiled in an amour fou. Why aren’t we talking more, or in fact all the time, about what a great actress Stewart is? Her snapping: “No!” in a tense situation and thereby refusing to let herself have a cigarette from a stray pack, is one of the laugh lines of the year.

Love Lies Bleeding channels Elmore Leonard in its garish tale of forbidden love, chaotic crime and gnarly incidental characters with bad hair and bad attitudes, but Glass and her co-writer Weronika Tofilska playfully give us some Jonathan Swift in having Gulliver’s Travels on the TV in one shot, and then giving us a surreal Brobdingnagian freakout in the climactic confrontation.

The setting is a town in the New Mexico desert – a Breaking Bad-type landscape striated with dangerous ravines – and the date is 1989, though you might not notice the absence of smartphones until news about the Berlin Wall crops up in one scene. Lou is employed at a gym, whose walls are plastered with two kinds of poster: the ones disclaiming legal responsibility for equipment-related injuries and the ones telling you to push yourself, because pain is just weakness leaving the body. Sadly, many characters are to experience that other and more commonplace kind of pain which is weakness entering the body.

Lou’s life has been about banal workplace tasks such as unblocking the lavatories, but is suddenly exalted by the lightning strike of love. A new customer called Jackie (Katy O’Brian) is passing through on her way to the bodybuilding championships in Las Vegas: ripped, tough and devastatingly sexy. They fall in love, and Lou fatefully introduces Jackie to steroids. Meanwhile, federal officers are inquiring about Lou’s estranged father Lou Sr (Ed Harris) and both Lou and Jackie boil with rage about the way Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) is being beaten up her odious husband JJ (Dave Franco), for whom a reckoning is on its way.

For a film as over-the-top as this, it might be counterintuitive to talk about subtlety, but Stewart is genuinely that; her line readings are coolly calibrated, quizzical, restrained, sometimes infinitesimally double-taking at the bizarre or outrageous things happening in front of her. Her lack of obvious response is due to being herself much tougher than we quite realised. Harris is queasily gruesome as Lou Sr, a gun-club manager and insect enthusiast who is also the proprietor of a hilariously grand hacienda featuring a portrait of himself and Lou’s stepmother. This could be a new grindhouse classic; in this world, love is bleeding but it’s not taking anything lying down.

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