People don’t talk enough about how funny Bong Joon Ho’s movies are. That’s probably to be expected from one of the greatest masters of tension working in movies today — but it’s a shame, because even his tensest movies are also funny as hell.
With his latest movie, Mickey 17, director Bong has finally made an out-and-out comedy: the story of a miserable clone worker who gets killed in the name of science over and over. It’s all pitch-black humor, a little bit of affliction, and a lot of heart; in other words, a sci-fi comedy that only Bong Joon Ho could pull off, which also makes it the perfect time to finally give him the comedic credit he deserves.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for many Bong Joon Ho movies. It does not contain spoilers for Mickey 17.]
While tension might be what he’s most immediately associated with, the truth is Bong Joon Ho is just a master of mood in general. Like most truly great directors, he is an expert at using every part of the filmmaking process to guide audiences to the feelings he’s trying to convey. More so than almost any director in history, one of the things that marks his movies as so singular and specific is the elegance with which he mixes together genres. In single scenes he can flit from horror to romance to melancholy to action, all while feeling perfectly seamless and eluding any kind of conventional classification.
But in all this genre mastery, comedy is perhaps the sharpest tool in his kit. Whether it’s a well-timed diversion to give the viewer a break between intense moments, like every ridiculous, over-the-top detail of Tilda Swinton’s performance in Snowpiercer, or something more crucial to the story, he always knows when the moment is right for a joke.
While Bong might build entire scenes or conversations out of other genres, he uses comedy like seasoning, bringing out the full flavors of even the smallest elements of his characters or plots. Park Gang-du’s (Song Kang-ho) attempted sacrifice at the end of The Host wouldn’t mean quite as much if we didn’t spend the beginning of the movie watching his extremely funny, lackadaisical laziness at his convenience stand. Similarly, Park Doo-man’s (also Song Kang-ho) slow arc toward despair and madness in Memories of Murder wouldn’t hit the same way if we didn’t see his earlier goofiness.
Parasite is perhaps the best example of how Bong uses pitch-black humor to constantly underline a movie’s themes. The scene of Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and Choi Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) on the couch having sex while the entire Kim family is tucked under their coffee table is absolutely hilarious; a scene and situation so bizarre you can’t do anything but laugh. At the same time, though, it’s also the entire movie in miniature: the Parks’ opulent wealth, in this case a coffee table big enough to squeeze in a family of four, literally blinding them to the poor people in their lives while they galavant around having sex on couches. Like everything in Bong’s movies, it’s just another example of every mechanism working in perfect sync to tell the story.
While comedy has played an important but supporting role in so many of Bong’s films up to this point, with Mickey 17 he gets to invert the formula. The movie is hilarious, openly (and successfully) vying for laughs in nearly every scene — thanks in large part to Robert Pattinson’s incredible physical comedy chops and his absolutely ridiculous voice.
Bong also reiterates himself as a whiz of slapstick and visual humor, and the script too (particularly the narration) is full of hilarious and bizarre little jokes about the peculiarities of how Mickey 17 views the world. But it wouldn’t be a Bong Joon Ho movie if it was only a simple comedy. Scenes that start funny in Mickey 17 often take an unexpected turn, suddenly flying into violence, gore, or even white-knuckled tension at the drop of a hat. It’s a masterful blend of genres in a way that few other modern directors even attempt, and that Bong seems to pull off easily in every movie he makes. Every scene has elastic flexibility and madcap energy that helps its jokes land harder and amplifies its moments of horror, action, and suspense in a way that only Bong Joon Ho could.