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Parasite, the newest film from Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer), opened to near universal acclaim after its premiere at the Cannes film festival earlier this year – ultimately winning the coveted Palme d’Or. Naturally I went into the film with a certain level of expectation and, suffice to say, that it more than lived up to the hype. 

The plot centres around two families from opposite ends of the class system: the Kims, who live in an impoverished semi-basement where they fold pizza boxes for money and leave the windows open when exterminators are working in nearby buildings so they can get free fumigation; and the Parks, who live in a luxurious mansion house and are waited-on, hand and foot, by myriad workers. When the son of the Kim clan (Choi Woo-shik) gets a job as an English language tutor at the Park household, the family use the situation to their advantage and they proceed to infiltrate his wealthy employers by each taking up different working positions (the father as their driver, mother as housekeeper, etc.) without allowing the Parks to know that they are related. 

In a time where esteemed filmmakers like Martin Scorsese mourn the diminished screening space available to smaller, independent filmmaking in favour of Marvel blockbusters, perhaps some hope can be found in the box office success of Parasite, which has made over $100 million worldwide and the best per-theatre opening of all time in the US for a foreign language film. 

The film itself is truly refreshing, imbued with the darkest of dark humour and biting social satire. The first act plays almost like a comedy heist film, with the precise, calculated planning of the street-smart Kims allowing them to orchestrate the firing of the Park family’s previous employees and to then move in swiftly to take the vacant jobs. This provides some excellent gags early in the film, mostly at the expense of the ditsy Park matriarch Yeon-gyo (played with wonderful upper-class obliviousness by Cho Yeo-jeong). Although very funny throughout, the film also steps at times into the realm of social horror, with one excruciatingly tense sequence in the middle being a standout. From this point on, the plot twists and turns relentlessly and great credit must go to the screenwriters, Han Jin Won and Bong Joon-ho, who really keep you guessing until the film’s shocking conclusion.

While the audience sees things from the perspective of the lower-class Kim family, the script never tries to justify their wrongdoing, but gives an understanding of the reasons behind their actions. Nor does it seek to completely villainise the Park family either. They have their prejudices against their poorer counterparts – a recurring theme is their smell, which the wealthy father Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun Gyun) describes as offensive, the kind of smell you would experience riding the subway – but ultimately, they pay them well for their service. This moral ambiguity is key to the film’s success as it never deigns to demonise either class.

Furthermore, the contrast between the two families is also often highlighted visually. For instance, in their semi-basement home, the Kims literally live underground. Then, when the son goes to the Park house for the first time he walks uphill, on a private residential area indicating a rise up the social ladder. Equally, when a rainstorm hits, the Kims must trudge through dark, torrentially flooded streets to salvage what they can from their house while the Parks look out from their warmly lit living room and comment on the beauty of it. These are just two examples of the stellar work of the Director Of Photography, Hong Kyung-pyo.

Overall, this film is easily one of the best, and probably my favourite, of the year (though as a Scorsese lover, The Irishman could change that). It is funny, occasionally horrifying, always surprising and filled with timely social relevance. Boasting a bitingly satirical script and beautifully precise cinematography, Bong Joon-ho’s latest is a boldly confident masterpiece from a filmmaker at the top of his game. Simply a must-see.

Parasite is released in Irish cinemas on February 7, 2020.