#19 Parasite

In Summary

The first foreign-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar, it's Parasite.

Marking a return to a full Korean-language features after ventures in English-language cinema with the varyingly successful Snowpiercer and Okja, director Bong Joon-Ho tells a story of the class divide in current day South Korea.

Somewhere between a social satire, black comedy and a thriller, with elements of horror, Parasite focuses on how the poor Kim family slowly supplant themselves into the lives of the rich Park family.

Parasite never really settles on which side of the divide upon which it focuses its scorn. On the one hand, the Kim family are dirty, greedy, and conniving, on the other, the Parks are pretentious, aloof and gullible. In different ways, either side of the class divide is just as ridiculous as the other.

The key theme of Parasite is the crossing of boundaries. The Park's house is walled-off sanctuary from the rest of Seoul which the Kims, one-by-one, breach. Much of the dialogue between the two families sees the Kims threaten to cross the line, only to just stop short. Furthermore, Bong Joon-Ho constantly finds ways to insert literal boundary lines into his camera work.

Seeming to be playing out as a farce, Parasite, suddenly takes a left-turn towards somewhere darker, which only further muddies the ability of the audience to sympathise with any character. What has made Parasite a success, is that the effect of this muddying points the finger of scorn towards the class divide itself rather than any one side of it.

A Memorable Quote

Money is an iron. Those creases all get smoothed out by money.

Things You May Not Know

• The Parks' house was built completely from scratch for the film.
• The Scholar Stone was included in the film as a reference to Director Bong Joon-Ho's father, who collected them. Bong Joon-Ho has stated in interviews that the stone is not meant to represent anything.
• Bong Joon-Ho wrote the song for the closing credits himself.

One of the Greatest of All-Time?
Although Parasite is in a foreign language and focuses on a number of specificities of Korean culture, its central theme of the class divide is something that most developed cultures can feel offers a commentary upon their own lives.

Furthermore, Bong Joon-Ho borrows a number of storytelling and visual techniques that Western audiences will be familiar with, from Alfred Hitchcock to the Coen Brothers. The overall effect of this is that Parasite feels like a Western film where the characters just so happen to be speaking Korean.

Universal yet specific, funny yet intense, artistic yet unpretentious, watchable yet thought-provoking. Parasite is an excellent viewing experience.