Parasite

The archive already holds a 1968 science-fiction film, a 1954 Japanese samurai epic, a 1948 Italian neorealist landmark, a 1957 Swedish allegory, a 1972 American crime saga and a 2000 Hong Kong romance — all twentieth-century, all with reputations built over decades.

This one is different. It is the archive's first South Korean film and its first made within the last ten years. More importantly, its status as a classic was not conferred decades later; it was settled inside a single awards season. Palme d'Or in May 2019, Best Picture in February 2020 — eight months apart. The last film to do that was Marty in 1955.

It pairs against today's other pick, Breathless: one a mature industrial production from 2019, the other an author's debut from 1960; one pushing genre to its limit, the other nearly dismantling it. Fifty-nine years apart, both are about young people with no money, no plan and a determination to keep going.

首尔。金家四口人住在一间半地下室里：父亲金基泽、母亲忠淑、儿子金基宇、女儿金基婷。全家没有稳定工作，靠给披萨店折纸盒之类的零工过日子，家里的窗户和街面齐平，醉汉会在窗外小便。

转机来得很偶然。金基宇的朋友敏赫要出国，把自己手上的一份家教工作转给了他——给一户有钱人家的女儿补习英语。敏赫还留下一块「学者之石」，说是能带来财运。

基宇伪造了学历，去面试。他很快发现这户人家的女主人崔妍乔天真、好说话，而这家的需求远不止一个英语老师。于是他开始一步步安排：先让妹妹伪装成美术治疗师进去，再想办法让父亲顶掉原来的司机，最后连母亲也进了这栋房子。一家人用假身份、假履历和恰到好处的谎言，各占了一个位置。

影片前半段是一部节奏精确的骗术喜剧。但这部电影真正的重量不在前半段。当所有人都以为这家人已经稳稳站住的时候，故事会转向另一个方向——具体是什么，这里不写。

Director and origins

Bong Joon-ho, born in Daegu in 1969, had directed Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006), Mother (2009), Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017). Parasite was his first film shot in South Korea since Mother, and his fourth with Song Kang-ho. He wrote the screenplay with Han Jin-won from his own story. Among his stated starting points was his own experience in his early twenties tutoring the child of a wealthy family, and the feeling of 'intruding into the private life of complete strangers'. He has named three direct influences: the Korean film The Housemaid (1960), in which a middle-class household is threatened by an outsider working inside it; the 1930s French Papin sisters case; and Kurosawa's High and Low (1963), whose design for the wealthy protagonist's house was a key visual reference.

Space as class

Bong has called it a 'stairway movie'. Class is written as vertical distance: the Kims live in a semi-basement (banjiha, a cheap Seoul housing type prone to damp and mould), the Parks' architect-designed house has a garden and floor-to-ceiling windows, and the deepest secret in the story sits below the house. Every shift in a character's position corresponds to a change of level.

Structure

The first forty minutes are a precise con-artist comedy: the family forges credentials, invents personas and exploits its employers' weaknesses to install itself one by one. Then the genre slides — comedy closes, thriller takes over, tragedy lands. Bong's own description: 'a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains.' That structural turn is what separates it from ordinary films about class: it argues through genre rather than through speeches.

Craft and performance

Cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo, editing by Yang Jin-mo, production design by Lee Ha-jun, music by Jung Jae-il. The Parks' house and the Kims' semi-basement are two entirely different lighting systems — bright, open and neutral above; low, dim and yellow below. Smell matters just as much: it cannot be partitioned by architecture, and it becomes the film's most effective class marker. The cast is led by Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Jang Hye-jin, Lee Jung-eun and Park Myung-hoon. Nobody is written as a cartoon villain, which is part of why the film is harder to sit through than its premise suggests.

Records and legacy

It premiered at Cannes on 21 May 2019 and won the Palme d'Or — the first Korean film to do so, and the first unanimous winner since Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013). At the 92nd Academy Awards in February 2020 it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film, with nominations for editing and production design. Best Picture made it the first non-English-language film ever to take that award, and it was the first film since Marty (1955) — 65 years — to win both the Palme d'Or and Best Picture; only three films have ever done it. Bong is the second Asian director to win Best Director, after Ang Lee. It also took the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, two BAFTAs, and the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast — the first international film to win that prize. Budget: about ₩13.5bn ($11.4m). Worldwide gross: about ₩377.3bn ($258m).

On the title, Bong has said the double meaning was deliberate: 'Because the story is about a poor family infiltrating a rich family's home, Parasite seems to obviously refer to the poor family. But if you look at it another way, you could also say the rich family is a parasite in terms of labour. They can't even wash dishes or drive themselves; they live off the labour of the poor family. So both are parasites.'