Review of Parasite

Hard to say much about this now that it's won best film at the Oscars. It's suspensful and gripping all the way through, and it feels like it's saying something about class and power...though on reflection I'm not really sure how profound or important the message is. Bad things happen to poor people, and their lives feel like a long series of bad luck incidents - as the father in the poor family says, the best plan is to have no plan, presumably because there's no point in planning when you are so subject to the forces of fate.

This starts out looking a bit like a comedy scam film as the poor family wheedle their way into the gullible rich family and start taking them for a ride, happily trashing the lives of their existing servants to supplant them without much concern. Then it suddenly turns into something a lot more like horror, though there's no real torture-porn and nothing supernatural.

I can't say I 'enjoyed' it, but I appreciated it as a good well-made film. I note in passing that almost no-one has drawn any comparison with Bong Joon-Ho's earlier film 'Snowpiercer', which was also about hierarchy and class power, and had lots of blood and gore.

Watched at the O2 complex in Finchley Road, London.