Parasite (2019) SPOILERS INEVITABLE

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I didn't catch this at the cinema but I got the BluRay in the post yesterday and watched it last night. Parasite lived up to the hype. Along with being thrilling, shocking, funny, tragic and beautifully shot, etc., it stuck around in my brain after the credits rolled.

I kept thinking about the symbolism that I'd missed first-time around (the basement dwelling family being fumigated like cockroaches), the moral ambiguities it sets up (the parasitic family are sort of evil, but also sort of heroic; the rich family are smug and privileged, but also in a way 'innocent'), and so on.

About a month ago I watched The Host, which I also absolutely loved, as much if not even more than Parasite.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I saw it, didnt think much tbh, it was ok, but i sort of drifted off when the twists and turns after the couple under the stairs got too much. I find that hyper real style a bit too much for me. Cant say im in a rush to see another. Soz!
 

catalog

Well-known member
over the top? Like it's heightened, in terms of how they are living in the beginning, how unlikely it all is? The madness especially with the people under the stairs. I couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to get carried away, cos I got caught up thinking 'that's not gonna happen'. Also the style of it, the cinematography, it was very shiny, metallic and coarse to me
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Oh I see.

Yeah, it's certainly not a grounded, realistic film. I kind of loved that, though, it was very tongue in cheek about itself, too.

What's interesting for me, as someone for whom the film worked, is how despite that lack of realism it was quite poignant and moving, and made me think about the "real" world afterwards.
 
Brilliant. I think I spoke about it on the film thread with you. I don’t like thrillers, horrors too much, they mostly don't thrill or horrify. Expectations (i’ve been over this) but this director balances humour and the quotidian with fear and violence in a really unsettling way. The pacing is very well done, could almost say the first two thirds are a different genre to the last
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Finally got around to seeing this the other day. "Lives up to the hype" is about right. I was slightly surprised at how political it was - all that stuff about class and wealth; how it's "easy to be nice" when you're rich - the smell of poverty, of wearing clothes that are permanently infused with cooking smells, that never really get properly dry because you live in a dank basement - the visual metaphor of the stink bugs that infest the place.

Also, it's the third Korean film I've seen and the third Korean film I've seen in which mobile phones feature very, very prominently.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
We saw I Saw the Devil yesterday which is an extremely violent Korean film but yeah had a fair bit of mobile phones in it too I guess. Maybe it's a bit more honest to feature them prominently rather than your average western horror which always has the "Oh no my battery is dead - yours too?" or "My phone has no signal" cos otherwise they would just use them to escape really easily.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Phone from 2002 would be the classic Korean cursed mobile phone horror film

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see also the "One Missed Call" franchise in Japan - think ringu but instead of watching a VHS tape, it's getting a phone call that is going to get you killed in a horrific manner
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
One of my big takeaways from watching Parasite was that not being wealthy enough to have an incredible garden like that in the middle a city means that it would have been better I had never been born.
 

sus

Well-known member
It was good but I don't remember any of the takes. I also watched Mother and liked it. And The Handmaiden which Nico swears I watched with her and I have no memory of. I always enjoy them but they never stick.
 

sus

Well-known member
I saw it, didnt think much tbh, it was ok, but i sort of drifted off when the twists and turns after the couple under the stairs got too much. I find that hyper real style a bit too much for me. Cant say im in a rush to see another. Soz!
A metaphor... social "rank" and hierarchy visualized into upper / lower / untouchable... DYK that one of the most cross-culturally robust findings in religious anthropology is a heaven/hell sky/underground hierarchy?
 

sufi

lala
One of my big takeaways from watching Parasite was that not being wealthy enough to have an incredible garden like that in the middle a city means that it would have been better I had never been born.
disappointed to find that the house was mocked up in a studio not a real building
 
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