Parasite
A masterful story, breaking the ice with black comedy, but leading to chilling societal commentary.
An economic downturn leads to the Kim family (no, not that one) being barely scraping by. They live in a sub-basement, everyone is unemployed and the kids don’t have money for university.
An opportunity appears to privately tutor some rich kid, which only “requires” forging college papers, so why the hell won’t he? One thing leads to another, and soon they are displacing the other workers to trick the rich into employing the whole family.
The ruse works, up until they discover their previous neighbour living in the bunker in they house. He was married to the previous live-in maid, but was hounded by debts just lives underground now.
Their struggle lead to deaths, from both sides. Only the rich get away with it.
Instead of fighting the common “enemy”, they struggle amongst them for the possibility of being salaried workers.
Class struggle can be broken down by keeping the lower classes on the brink of starvation, leading to needless competition for abundant resources. If only the two servant families cooperated, there was enough to go around for both of them. Human frailty strikes again.
There’s so much product placement for luxury brands this could almost be seen as The Man sticking it to The Man. Almost.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.