It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with Genevieve Koski. Scott Tobias. Keith Phipps. On our last episode, we talked about the host, Bong Joon Ho's unconventional monster movie, which breaks all the rules by putting its CGI critter front and center

in the opening act, then pitting a family of loving incompetence against it. That family has a few

things in common with the family at the center of Parasite, Bong's latest movie. Key among them is

the return of actor Song Kang Ho, who starred as the hapless young dad and the host, and reappears

as a somewhat more capable and certainly more traditional father and parasite. This time his family is a group of low-level grifters,

living in a depressingly cluttered underground apartment, where they steal Wi-Fi, fold pizza

boxes badly for extra cash, and band together to get by. Then a well-off friend of the family,

finagles the teenage son, Ki-Wu, into a position tutoring

the teenage daughter of a rich family. Ki-Wu quickly sees an opportunity and manages to slip his sister,

Ki-Jong, in as an art instructor for the rich family's bratty young son. He brings his father,

Kai Tak, in as the family chauffeur, and his mother, Chung-sook, in as the family's housekeeper.

This involves

undermining the people already in those positions and pretending that none of the members of

Kiwu's family know each other and that they're all experienced at their jobs. Briefly, the two

families are closely and peacefully bonded. But the lies and the poorer families of ambitions begin to

pile up, a massive secret about the rich family's home comes to

late, and a major confrontation starts brewing. Parasite feels weirdly similar to the host,

even though there's no monster insight, unless you count entitlement, class inequity,

poverty, and greed as monsters, which maybe you should, given how they've shaped Parasite's

...