Parasite: Bong Joon Ho, 2019
2019 · movie
Parasite premiered at the Cannes film festival in May 2019 and won the Palme d'Or by unanimous vote of the jury. Nine months later, at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, it won best picture, best director, best original screenplay and best international feature. No film in a language other than English had ever won best picture in ninety two years of the award, and its director Bong Joon Ho became the first person to take the top prizes at both events for the same work in more than sixty years.
The story follows the Kim family, who live in a semi basement flat in Seoul and fold pizza boxes for a living, as one by one they take jobs in the household of the wealthy Park family by pretending to be strangers to one another. It begins as a comedy of manners and turns into something much harder, and the film's control of that turn is the reason people argue about which genre it belongs to.
Much of the meaning is carried by architecture. The Park house was built as a set by the production designer Lee Ha jun, a construction of clean lines and long horizontals, while the Kim home sits below street level where the windows look out at pavement. The film moves between them by descending, and a long sequence in the rain takes the characters down flight after flight of stairs into a flooded neighbourhood.
Parasite made more than two hundred and fifty million dollars worldwide and pushed Korean cinema fully into the mainstream of world film. In Seoul the semi basement flats it depicted became a subject of public policy debate after the heavy floods of 2022. The film is now the standard reference for a story about inequality that never states its argument out loud.