Parasite
Bong Joon-ho’s winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes combines the genres of black comedy and home invasion thriller in the satirical tale about a rich Korean family and a poor one.
A glorious success and smashing box-office hit for Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho – who returns home after his foreign adventures in SNOWPIERCER and OKJA – PARASITE moves quickly from one tone to another, mixing pathos and satire with thrills and drama, in a perfectly controlled blend of many different genres. It starts as a social-realist drama about a poor family struggling to find work in modern-day Seoul. By the end of its 132-minute runtime, it will have cycled through black comedy, social satire, home invasion thriller, and slapstick.
A story of class struggle, PARASITE dissects with surgical precision the life of two families of different social backgrounds. Ki-taek is the unemployed patriarch of a family of derelicts – his wife Chung-sook, his clever daughter Ki-jung, and his son Ki-woo – who live in an overcrowded, sordid basement. The Parks, on the other hand, live in a fabulous house with their teenage daughter Da-hye and terribly spoiled son Da-song. When, due to an unexpected stroke of luck, Ki-woo is hired by the Parks to be the private English tutor of Da-hye, the destinies of the two families cross. Their explosive meeting exposes the merciless evils of class inequalities, culminating in a powerful and utterly original outcome. (source: www.tiff.net)
PARASITE won 4 Oscars, including Best Picture, Directing, International Feature Film and Writing (Original Screenplay). It also became the first non-English language film in Oscar history to win the award for Best Picture.