You have to give it to them: the Kims, the protagonists of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, are nothing if not resourceful. At the suggestion of a friend, the son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) pretends to be a student in order to get a position as the English tutor for the daughter of a wealthy couple, complete with photoshopped diploma. It doesn’t take long and he’s introduced his sister Ki-jeong (Park So-Dam) to the Park family and she takes on the job of being the youngest child’s art therapist. It’s amazing how you can fake expertise with little more than Google skills and a knack for improvisation. Before long, the entire family – Ki-woo, Ki-jeong and the parents Ki-taek (Bong stalwart Song Kang-ho) and Choong Sook (Jang Hye-jin) – are in the gainful employ of the Parks, one recommending the other, as that’s how the Parks work: they only trust employees that come highly recommended by another trusted employee. Oh, my father has a friend who used to work as a chauffeur. Oh, I know of this housekeeper who’d be just perfect for you. And the rich, friendly (if patronising), gullible Parks eat it all up. They get the domestic help they want and the Kims get the gainful employment they need, so it’s a win-win situation, right?
To cut a long story short: no. Parasite isn’t a story about the joys of sucessful social mobility. It isn’t a hymn to faking it till you make it. No, Bong’s latest is a caustic comedy that turns into a war movie – the war in question being that between the classes. And as another war story set in Korea used to say: war is hell.
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I’ve heard it said that the majority of neo-nazis and other members of extreme right-wing associations contemplate suicide at least once in their lives because subconsciously, they sense that their world-view is wrong. In Guy Nattiv’s Skin, Bryon Widner (Jamie Bell) is at this point. He is a member of the Vinlanders Social Club, not a social club at all, led by Fred ‘Hammer’ Krager (an unrecognizable Bill Camp), a stern father figure who is married to Shareen (Vera Farmiga), who actively tells everyone that they can call her Mum. It’s a bunch of people who have nowhere else to go, socially as well as economically, and they are just happy that there is someone who takes care of them and gives them things to do, no matter how vile or poisonous their chores are. The VSC is a family for people who never had a proper family. It would be a huge mistake to think that Fred and Shareen are in any way dumb or ridiculous. They provide food and shelter for strays and manipulate them into becoming white supremacists. They are not above murder, so be warned. The more they clash with their preceived enemies, the more they come alive, and the more dangerous they are. 
It’s possible to have great fun in a predictable formula movie. My daughter and me went to see Yesterday, about a luckless singer who has a road accident and wakes up in a world without the Beatles songbook. It slowly dawns on poor Jack that he is the only one who remembers the Fab Four. Screenplay by Richard Curtis, directed by Danny Boyle. That’s a pretty snazzy premise, innit? We went during a sweltering hot day, the movie theater was cool, and it was the tiniest viewing room in our city. “It’s just like a movie theater people would have at home,” she exclaimed. We were the only ones sitting there, and so we sang along to all the tunes. Great fun. 
Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer fails for me (and maybe for me only) on a mere technicality. Consider Nicole Kidman’s character, a police detective by the name of Erin Bell. She walks as if she is in constant pain, or medicated, or both. There are flashbacks with her partner and later boyfriend Chris, where she looks younger and healthy. It’s just that it is implied that she has to take drugs and/or alcohol in order to infiltrate the bank heist crew run by Silas (Toby Kebbell). There are only very few scenes, and very late in the movie, that really let us know what it cost Erin to stay in Silas’ crew. What drungs did she have to take in order to keep her disguise? And what about Chris? And her lower jaw seems wired or dislocated – is that from the car crash she produced herself long ago? We just don’t know. And it’s Erin Bell’s face that the whole movie rotates around. On the whole, Destroyer raises far more questions that it answers. 
