It only took 4 years but I finally got around to watching Bong Joon-ho's bleakly funny, award-winning classic, Parasite. Not too shabby considering the length of time it took for me to discover his 2006 giant monster movie, The Host, which is--unsurprisingly--often funny and a little bleak. The two movies also share the same lead actor, Song Kang-ho, who plays a down-at-heels dad in both films. In Parasite, his entire family is unemployed with little hope of remedying their situation anytime soon. The Kims live in squalor, earning spare change by assembling pizza boxes for a local pizza delivery company. Their semi-underground apartment is cramped, smelly and apparently infested with "stink bugs". The bathroom toilet is situated on a shelf next to a window, and only a couple of feet from the ceiling; actually using the toilet would seem to require some nimble bit of contortionism. Things aren't look rosy for the Kim Family.

And then one day the son runs into an old school friend who is now attending college (Kevin, the son, isn't so lucky). However, as the two young men catch up on one another's lives, the friend informs Kevin that he has been making extra cash tutoring English to the teenage daughter of an extremely wealthy family. Since he's leaving the city to study abroad, the young man wonders if Kevin might be interested in taking his place. Kevin is, he insists, extremely capable of doing the job even if he hasn't been able to pass the college entrance exams. That will come in time, he assures Kevin, but for now, the tutoring gig pays good money. Plus, Kevin is the only person the boy trusts not to make a move on his young pupil, for whom he has the hots. He'll give Kevin the highest recommendation if only Kevin will take the job. 

And so it begins. After Kevin's hacker sister produces fake documents to lend credibility to Kevin's new backstory, he's off to the races. Soon enough, so is the rest of the Kim Family as, one by one, the father, the mother and the sister insinuate themselves into the daily lives of the entitled, well-to-do Park Family. It's an extremely ambitious scheme to lift themselves out of poverty but are the Kims polished enough to pull it off? After all, they lack discipline and composure, and they are not master criminals: they are, in other words, way out of their element. 

As the movie progresses, the comedy becomes much darker as class differences and resentments boil over and a secret passageway reveals yet more deception and mayhem. The climax, when it comes, is shocking but not really surprising, the ending tragic and bittersweet. The characters, all unlikable to varying degrees, succeed in eliciting a measure of our sympathy by the time the final credits roll, a testament to the skill of the actors, the excellent script and Joon-ho's fine direction. 

At 132 minutes, Parasite never feels overly long and the plot never seems outside the realm of possibility. It's a well-executed, compelling film that moves along at a nice pace and has a lot to say about class and the expanding chasm between the haves and have-nots.