Parasite

Parasite (2019) is about a poor family infiltrating a rich household, and it does that in three genres at once. The Ki-taek family lives in a semi basement, all unemployed, getting by folding pizza boxes. The son gets in as an English tutor to the wealthy Park family's daughter. Then his sister becomes the art tutor, then the father the driver, then the mother the housekeeper. None of them admits to knowing the others. The first half plays like a con comedy. Then a basement door opens and the genre changes entirely. The language Bong Joon Ho actually uses is architecture. The rich are above, the poor below, and the characters are forever going up or down stairs. The rain sequence shows it most plainly: the same rain is a view for one family and a flood for the other. The Park house is not a real house. It was built entirely as a set, because no existing building offered the level changes and sightlines the film needed. It won both the Palme d'Or and Best Picture, the second film ever to do so, and became the first film not in English to take Best Picture. Bong made a remark about subtitles in an acceptance speech that became one of the most quoted lines of that year. It runs 133 minutes. Good for: films about class, genre hybrids, and Korean cinema. Less good for: the violence arrives suddenly and hard, the tone shifts halfway through, and the ending offers no comfort.