There are dwellings in this world raised upon the ruin of other dwellings, and there are families who dwell in the depths of their betters without those betters ever suspecting the passage beneath their feet. Such is the dreadful design of Parasite, a picture that comes upon the spectator with the patience of a spirit and strikes with the swift force of a knife. I confess I sat through it as one sits through a fever — helpless, held fast, unable to look away from my own reflection in its glass.
The Dwelling of Two Families
The tale concerns a family of little fortune who, through artifice and forgery, work themselves one by one into the employ of a family of great and careless wealth. What begins as a comedy of false character — false teachers, false drivers, false servants — turns bitter, by gradual degrees, into something altogether more melancholy.
The dwelling itself, all glass and stone and concealed passage, becomes a character of its own, a chamber of secrets raised by a designer who perhaps already knew the dreadful uses to which his creation would be put. Beneath this house lies another house, and beneath that comfortable family lies a poverty they have scarcely imagined, walled up as if in stone, like some ancient premature burial.
When the waters come — and they come in truth, filling the poor family’s rooms with mire while the rich family sleeps in a chamber the water never reached above — the picture ceases to be satire and becomes lamentation.
The Design of Its Art
What astonishes is the delicacy of the whole mechanism. Every object, every stone, every passage is placed with the deliberation of an executioner testing his instrument. Nothing is left to chance; the narrow window at street level through which drunken men make water is no mere detail but a prophecy.
The director’s eye is without mercy and exact, and he arranges his actors — every one excellent, every one convincing in dread and in mirth — as a player arranges pieces he intends to sacrifice. The humor, when it comes, is black as a raven’s wing, and never long permitted to comfort us. We laugh, and the laugh is snatched away before it finishes in the throat.
This is not carelessness but design: the same hand that amuses us is preparing the steel for the third act, and when the killing finally arrives at the gathering and mirth, it comes with the swift force of a dead body disclosed at a gathering of pleasure.
A Melancholy Verdict
If I have any quarrel with Parasite, it is only that its final passages, however just, leave the heart with little consolation — the poor remain poor, the dead remain dead, and the letter written in secret hope reads like a jest played upon the reader as much as upon him who receives it. But perhaps this is the truest honesty a work of this kind can offer: that class, like a contagion, does not depart merely because we have named it.
Parasite is an extraordinary piece of art, dreadful in its meaning and singular in its execution, a work that remains in the mind as certain shades are said to remain in old houses — not quite at rest, and unwilling to let the living rest either. It has earned every praise given unto it, and I do not doubt it will be studied long after its imitators have fallen to dust.