Parasite

(R)

A poor family embeds with a clueless wealthy clan.

This pitch-black comic thriller “might be the masterpiece South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho has been working toward his entire career,” said Barry Hertz in the Toronto Globe and Mail. The director of Snowpiercer won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year for his upstairs-downstairs tale of two families’ ill-fated convergence. A “genre-hopping triumph” that changes form before our eyes, Parasite is also “a furious indictment of class struggle.” Luck appears to have befallen a basement-dwelling family when the son lands a job tutoring the daughter of a wealthy tech executive. Soon all four family members have scammed their way into jobs in the mogul’s modernist mansion. Don’t bother guessing where this subtitled gem is heading, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “You keep expecting Parasite to turn into one thing, but it keeps turning into something else. It mutates, like a real parasite trying to hang on to its host.” Every twist, though, is “grounded in something human and real,” said Richard Lawson in VanityFair.com. That makes the film’s conclusion devastating. Parasite “speaks to our times so bracingly that you almost resent it for saying what it does so unignorably.” ■