parasite movie review telugu

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ఆస్కార్ విన్నింగ్ ‘పారాసైట్‌’పై రాజమౌళి షాకింగ్ రివ్యూ.. నెట్టింట చర్చ.. !

2019 సంవత్సరానికి గానూ ఉత్తమ చిత్రంగా కొరియన్ మూవీ పారాసైట్ ఆసార్క్‌ అవార్డును సొంతం చేసుకున్న విషయం తెలిసిందే..

TV9 Telugu Digital Desk | Edited By:

Updated on: Apr 21, 2020 | 9:46 AM

2019 సంవత్సరానికి గానూ ఉత్తమ చిత్రంగా కొరియన్ మూవీ పారాసైట్ ఆసార్క్‌ అవార్డును సొంతం చేసుకున్న విషయం తెలిసిందే. ఈ మూవీపై దర్శకధీరుడు రాజమౌళి షాకింగ్ కామెంట్లు చేశారు. ఓ టీవీ షోకు ఇచ్చిన ఇంటర్వ్యూ పారాసైట్ మూవీపై జక్కన్న స్పందించారు. ఆ సినిమా తనకు చాలా బోర్‌గా అనిపించిందని కామెంట్లు చేశారు. దీంతో ఇప్పుడు ఈ కామెంట్లు హాట్‌ టాపిక్‌ అయ్యాయి.

కాగా దక్షిణ కొరియాలో పేద, ధనవంతుల జీవనం మధ్య వ్యత్యాసాన్ని తెలుపుతూ బాన్‌ జూన్‌ హో ఈ చిత్రాన్ని తెరకెక్కించారు. ప్రతిష్టాత్మక కేన్స్‌ ఫెస్టివల్స్‌లో అవార్డును సాధించిన పారాసైట్.. ఉత్తమ విదేశీ చిత్రం, ఉత్తమ చిత్రం, ఉత్తమ దర్శకుడు, ఉత్తమ స్క్రీన్‌ప్లే కేటగిరీల్లో.. నాలుగు ఆస్కార్‌లను సొంతం చేసుకుంది. ప్రపంచవ్యాప్తంగా పలువురు క్రిటిక్స్‌ ఈ మూవీపై ప్రశంసలు కురిపించారు. అలాంటి ఈ మూవీపై ఇప్పుడు రాజమౌళి ఇలాంటి రివ్యూ ఇవ్వడం నెట్టింట హాట్ టాపిక్‌గా మారింది. కాగా ఈ సినిమా ఇప్పుడు ప్రముఖ  ఆన్‌లైన్‌ ఫ్లాట్‌ఫాం అమెజాన్‌ ప్రైమ్‌లో స్ట్రీమ్‌ అవుతోంది.

Read This Story Also: కరోనా అప్‌డేట్స్‌.. ఏఏ దేశాల్లో ఎక్కువగా ఉందంటే..!

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Greed and class discrimination threaten the newly-formed symbiotic relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan. Greed and class discrimination threaten the newly-formed symbiotic relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan. Greed and class discrimination threaten the newly-formed symbiotic relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan.

• Bong Joon Ho
• Han Jin-won
• Song Kang-ho
• Lee Sun-kyun
• Cho Yeo-jeong
• 3.6K User reviews
• 601 Critic reviews
• 97 Metascore
• 309 wins & 265 nominations total

• (as Song Kang Ho)

• (as Lee Sun Kyun)

• (as Cho Yeo Jeong)

• (as Choi Woo Shik)

• (as Park So Dam)

• (as Lee Jung Eun)

• (as Chang Hyae Jin)

• (as Park Myeong Hoon)

• (as Jung Ziso)

• (as Jung Hyeon Jun)

• Driver Yoon
• (as Park Keun Rok)

• CEO of Pizza Place
• (as Jeung Esuh)
• CEO's Brother of Pizza Place

• (as Jung Ik Han)

• Drunk Person 1
• Internet Cafe Staff
• (as Hwang In Kyung)

• Street Fighting Person 1
• (as Ahn Seong Bong)
• Street Fighting Person 2
• (as Kim Jin Hyung)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Ki-woo's job, at-home tutor, was chosen because director Bong Joon Ho realized that sadly the job is the only way that families from two extreme ends of the class spectrum in modern-day South Korea can cross their paths convincingly in the story arc.
• Goofs (at around 1h 30 mins) When the Kims are sneaking out of the house while the Parks are sleeping on the couch, the Kim's are barefoot. When seen running home they somehow now have their shoes. If they had left their shoes at the entrance the Parks would likely have noticed them. It would be more likely they would have left them in the garage.

Ki-taek : [to his son] You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned. Look around you. Did you think these people made a plan to sleep in the sports hall with you? But here we are now, sleeping together on the floor. So, there's no need for a plan. You can't go wrong with no plans. We don't need to make a plan for anything. It doesn't matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?

• Alternate versions Also available in a black-and-white version. Instead of opting for a simple digital bleaching, Bong Joon Ho worked with a colorist and cinematographer to make sure each scene retained its texture.
• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: 'Faster than your First Time' Reviews (Joker, Jojo Rabbit, Lucy in the Sky and everything else) (2019)
• Soundtracks Rodelinda: Act 2 - Spietati, io vi giurai Written by George Frideric Handel Universal Music

User reviews 3.6K

• bob the moo
• Aug 16, 2020
• How long is Parasite? Powered by Alexa
• Why weren't there any cameras inside Mr. Park's house?
• Why did the Kim family use English names for themselves when working for the Parks?
• How is Parasite a comedy? Apart from a couple of lines by the Mrs. Kim, I didn't find anything comedic.
• November 8, 2019 (United States)
• South Korea
• Barunson E&A (South Korea)
• CJ Entertainment (South Korea)
• Ký Sinh Trùng
• Jahamun-ro, Buam-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea (Ki Taek and family enter Jahamun tunnel, walking back home in the rain)
• CJ Entertainment
• Barunson E&A
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $11,400,000 (estimated)
• $53,369,749
• Oct 13, 2019
• $262,099,264

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 12 minutes
• Dolby Atmos

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Parasite movie review: A subtle and subversive depiction of class

Parasite movie review: bong joon-ho, who has also co-written the story, has several surprises and twists up his sleeve. and many metaphors..

Parasite movie cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam Parasite movie director: Bong Joon-Ho Parasite movie rating: 4 stars

Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s latest film, a top Oscar contender, is a subtle and subversive depiction of class. The setting is Korean, and Ho brings out that country’s obsession with America, English, North Korea and aspirations succinctly. But in depicting the many layers that divide, and blind, the rich from the poor, the poor from the rich, men from women, and husbands from wives, Parasite is universal. And very, very unsettling.

The rich are not all bad, and the poor not all good. However, it is in keeping up appearances, of both goodness and badness, and “not crossing the class line”, that we maintain what passes off as societal order. And so it is that the well-to-do Parks welcome into their house, one by one, an entire family who take up various jobs around their home without them being any wiser to what is happening. The husband (Ho-Song) takes no interest in running the household, the wife’s (Jo) worth lies in ensuring that he doesn’t have to. That everything from kids’ grades to their artistic talents, the cooking to the washing, even the hiring and the sacking, doesn’t demand any exertion from him.

The family they hire, the Kims, lives in a “semi-basement”, out of work but smart, ambitious and willing to cut corners to get ahead. The first to make his way into the Park home is Kevin (Choi), a smart man whose English can rival any university student’s but who is held back for lack of a degree. He is hired as the Park daughter’s tutor. He gets his sister (Park) in for the Park son, a little boy whose mother is convinced he has eccentric artistic talent. The sister, Jessica, convinces the Park wife that what her son’s scribblings actually indicate is childhood trauma, which “art therapy”, costing a little extra, will cure. Kim (a Ho favourite) comes in as the chauffeur and man about the Park house, and his wife ultimately as the housekeeper.

One night when the Parks are on a camping trip, Kim and family decide to have a nice little party at their home. They talk about how nice the Parks are, and whether it’s the money that makes them so, or whether it’s the fact that money means they are left with “no resentments”. Looking on at the front yard through large French windows, as a storm builds, they are imagining owning a house such as this, when their nightmare starts.

Ho, who has also co-written the story, has several surprises and twists up his sleeve. And many metaphors. About parasite, host. Upstairs, downstairs. Loyalty, love. Virtue, vice. Gutter, smell. Casual affluence, deliberate offence. Rain/sun for some, floods/heat for the other. And about the wool we pull over our eyes as we turn the other way, telling ourselves some lies to help us do that.

Ho strips that wool off, thread by thread. Right down to the only truth there is — not education, not degree, not work, but money.

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'Parasite' Hooks You With Its Emotional Power And Extraordinary Cunning

Justin Chang

Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong play Mr. and Mrs. Park, a wealthy couple whose hired help isn't quite what it seems, in Bong Joon-ho's thriller Parasite . Courtesy of NEON CJ Entertainment hide caption

Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong play Mr. and Mrs. Park, a wealthy couple whose hired help isn't quite what it seems, in Bong Joon-ho's thriller Parasite .

I was fortunate enough to go into Parasite knowing almost nothing about it. Bong Joon-ho's brilliant new movie packs the kinds of stunning, multi-layered surprises that deserve to be experienced as fresh as possible. I'll tread as cautiously as I can, but suffice to say that Parasite is a darkly comic thriller about two families: the Parks, who are very rich, and the Kims, who are very poor.

Mr. and Mrs. Kim live with their son, Ki-woo, and their daughter, Ki-jung, in a cramped apartment in Seoul. Years of poverty have made them shrewd, resilient and tough — and not above the occasional petty theft. Like the family in last year's great Japanese drama Shoplifters , they've managed to survive by relying on their wits and on each other.

One day Ki-woo, a high-school graduate, gets a job as an English tutor for an upper-class teenage girl named Da-hye. Her father, Mr. Park, is a millionaire tech titan, and they live in a gated modernist fortress of a house designed by a famous architect.

Ki-woo begins visiting the house to give his English lessons, and it's there that he meets Mrs. Park, who lets slip that she's looking for an art teacher for her mischief-making young son. Thinking fast, Ki-woo mentions a distant acquaintance who might be good for the job — and within days, his sister Ki-jung has been hired as a very expensive tutor.

The Kims enjoy their sudden boost in income, even as they strain to keep the Parks in the dark about their family connection and their lack of proper credentials. But the lies don't end there, and their scheme grows only more dangerous in its ambition.

For roughly its first hour, Parasite is the most deviously entertaining con-artist thriller I've seen in years. Director Bong pulls the pieces together with the elegance and flair of a conductor attacking a great symphony. Inch by inch, the Kims expand their domain. No piece of information, whether it's the matter of the housekeeper's allergy or the sexual habits of Mr. Park's driver, is too trivial to be used to their advantage.

From Korea, A Thriller Hitchcock Would Admire

Bong Joon-Ho's 'Okja' Is As Weird A Hybrid As Its Porcine Star

Bong draws us into a wicked sense of complicity with the Kims, who, for all their duplicity, are never hard to root for. But as fun as it is to see the Parks get hoodwinked, Bong doesn't turn them into easy villains. We see how gullible and vulnerable they are behind their bolted doors and high-tech security system. We see the cracks in their perfect-family facade: The actress Cho Yeo-jeong gives an especially nuanced performance as Mrs. Park, who, for all her breezy entitlement, lives in the shadow of her cold, unfeeling husband.

The Kims, by contrast, are a model of intimacy and fairness: When money and space are this tight, everyone has to pull their weight. They depend on each other so completely that they seem to function less like individuals than like a single organism. Maybe that makes them the "parasite" of the title, or maybe not. As the movie races toward a suspenseful and terrifying conclusion, it leaves little doubt as to whether the haves or the have-nots represent the greater scourge in a capitalist society.

Bong has always been deft at synthesizing thrills and politics. He previously tackled class warfare in his English-language thriller Snowpiercer , but Parasite feels even more closely related to his wonderful 2006 monster movie The Host , which also followed a desperate family trying to survive. The star of The Host was the popular actor Song Kang-ho, who returns in Parasite as Mr. Kim and gradually becomes the movie's angry moral center. More than his wife or kids, he understands what it means to be looked down on by people like the Parks and regarded as less than human.

At first you're right there with the Kims, until the story takes the first of many jaw-dropping turns. Parasite is seamless in the way it shuffles moods, tones and genres, and downright Hitchcockian in the way it manipulates your sympathies. It's a movie of extraordinary cunning and devastating emotional power, and after three viewings I'm still not sure quite how to classify it. Is it a comedy or a tragedy, a thriller or a satire, an art film or a popular entertainment? Maybe it's best to simply call it what it is: a masterpiece.

Correction Oct. 24, 2019

An earlier photo caption misstated Lee Sun-kyun's name as Sun Kyun-lee.

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Parasite movie review: Bong Joon-ho’s sensational masterpiece is the first great film of the new decade

Parasite movie review: bong joon-ho is one of the greatest living filmmakers in the world and parasite is a sensational masterpiece; the first great film of the new decade..

Parasite Director - Bong Joon-ho Cast - Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Chang Hyae-jin, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Lee Jung-eun

Depending on how you perceive the world, Bong Joon-ho ’s grand validation by the West can either be appreciated as a long-overdue acknowledgement of his formidable filmography, or it can be dismissed as yet another sign of the Oscars’ irrelevance in identifying true legends. I find myself somewhere in between.

Shall I let the pomp and pageantry of the Academy Awards convince me that my respect for Bong has in some way been inadequate for all these years, or should I simply ignore the attention he’s getting all of a sudden, convinced that America is simply late to the party?

Director Bong, as he’s affectionately (and reverentially) addressed by his cast and crew, has made four bona fide classics in his career; each of them of a different genre. His 2003 monster movie, The Host, was seen as an admonishment of American arrogance; in Okja , he skewered the food industry like a spicy tikka; and in Snowpiercer, his finest film, Director Bong confronted the notion of God.

But unlike his contemporaries, Park Chan-wook or Kim Ki-duk, Bong has largely operated in genre cinema, bringing his instantly recognisable idiosyncrasies — shocking tonal shifts, razor-sharp satire and delightfully dark humour — to subjects that other directors would typically address with solemnity.

The genre-fluid Parasite is like a greatest hits record -- cool, clinical, and incisive. It is an outlet for him to address all of his anxieties as a filmmaker, but also as a citizen of the modern world.

The theme of capitalism is once again brought up as Bong pits the rich Park family against the poor Kim clan, peppering the film with references to Native Americans and building towards an operatic crescendo in which class warfare takes on the form of a literal battle. After previously tackling climate change in Snowpiercer, Bong once again highlights the importance of the crisis, by shedding light on how it affects the rich and the poor differently. While the Park family is only slightly inconvenienced by a torrential downpour, the Kims’ entire existence is threatened when the same downpour floods their subterranean home.

Sometimes, Bong makes his points rather bluntly, like the scene in which the patriarch of the Kim family, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), is barely able to hide his anger when the matriarch of the Park family, Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), says that the rains have cleared the skies. Mere hours ago, his home was submerged; Yeon-gyo’s apathy towards Ki-taek’s plight is more insulting to him than when she scrunches up her nose at his ‘poor person smell’.

The scene takes place inside a car, which reminded me of a similar moment in Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy , in which Ranveer Singh’s Murad is reminded of the metaphorical distance between himself and the rich woman he’s driving, despite their physical proximity to each other.

Ki-taek works as a chauffeur for the Parks, after having successfully infiltrated the wealthy family with his wife and kids. Both clans rely upon the other; while the Parks wouldn’t be able to function without the invisible services provided by the Kims, the Kims depend on the Parks’ money to survive. There are no heroes or villains in the film; everyone’s a parasite.

Bong relies on his craft to make confrontational statements about class — his use of staircases as a visual metaphor for social mobility is remarkable. Such is the regularity with which he cuts to a character either climbing or descending stairs, that Parasite begins to resemble a sort of cinematic Ludo. The Parks’ magnificent bungalow is accessed after a steady uphill climb, while the Kims literally live underneath the rich and the powerful; bereft of not only wealth and opportunities, but also sunlight.

The Parks’ home, wonderfully constructed by Bong’s production designer, Lee Ha-jun, has several internal staircases, perhaps suggesting that even within certain socioeconomic groups, maintaining one’s position is an equally cutthroat business. The film is shot like a thriller, and despite his typical tonal transitions, Bong alternately conjures action sequences out of mundane domesticity, and transforms verbal exchanges into elaborate psychological con-games. For one scene, involving a kitchen table and near-silence, Bong seems to have exhumed the corpse of Alfred Hitchcock and drained it of every last ounce of inspiration.

Also read: Roma movie review: Alfonso Cuaron has made one of the best films of the decade; a cinematic game-changer. 5 stars

In Parasite, Bong doesn’t appear to be expressing empathy for the poor, like, say, Alfonso Cuaron did in Roma . Nor does he seem to be pointing fingers at the rich. He is, instead, questioning the very nature of mankind; its self-centred ingratitude and its propensity to create divisions and to resort to violence.

I have now seen Parasite twice. A third viewing has, in the meantime, been scheduled. But even a dozen repeat viewings would be inadequate to unravel its many (hidden) layers. It’s the best film of 2019, by far — an almost religious experience, deserving of a pilgrimage to the theatre.

Follow @htshowbiz for more The author tweets @RohanNaahar

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

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It’s so clichéd at this point in the critical conversation during the hot take season of festivals to say, “You’ve never seen a movie quite like X.” Such a statement has become overused to such a degree that it’s impossible to be taken seriously, like how too many major new movies are gifted the m-word: masterpiece. So how do critics convey when a film truly is unexpectedly, brilliantly unpredictable in ways that feel revelatory? And what do we do when we see an actual “masterpiece” in this era of critics crying wolf? Especially one with so many twists and turns that the best writing about it will be long after spoiler warnings aren’t needed? I’ll do my best because Bong Joon-ho ’s “Parasite” is unquestionably one of the best films of the year. Just trust me on this one.

Bong has made several films about class (including " Snowpiercer " and " Okja "), but “Parasite” may be his most daring examination of the structural inequity that has come to define the world. It is a tonal juggling act that first feels like a satire—a comedy of manners that bounces a group of lovable con artists off a very wealthy family of awkward eccentrics. And then Bong takes a hard right turn that asks us what we’re watching and sends us hurtling to bloodshed. Can the poor really just step into the world of the rich? The second half of “Parasite” is one of the most daring things I’ve seen in years narratively. The film constantly threatens to come apart—to take one convoluted turn too many in ways that sink the project—but Bong holds it all together, and the result is breathtaking.

Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) and his family live on the edge of poverty. They fold pizza boxes for a delivery company to make some cash, steal wi-fi from the coffee shop nearby, and leave the windows open when the neighborhood is being fumigated to deal with their own infestation. Kim Ki-woo’s life changes when a friend offers to recommend him as an English tutor for a girl he’s been working with as the friend has to go out of the country for a while. The friend is in love with the young girl and doesn’t want another tutor “slavering” over her. Why he trusts Kim Ki-woo given what we know and learn about him is a valid question.

The young man changes his name to Kevin and begins tutoring Park Da-hye (Jung Ziso), who immediately falls for him, of course. Kevin has a much deeper plan. He’s going to get his whole family into this house. He quickly convinces the mother Yeon-kyo, the excellent Jo Yeo-jeong, that the son of the house needs an art tutor, which allows Kevin’s sister “Jessica” ( Park So-dam ) to enter the picture. Before long, mom and dad are in the Park house too, and it seems like everything is going perfectly for the Kim family. The Parks seem to be happy too. And then everything changes.

The script for “Parasite” will get a ton of attention as it’s one of those clever twisting and turning tales for which the screenwriter gets the most credit (Bong and Han Jin-won , in this case), but this is very much an exercise in visual language that reaffirms Bong as a master. Working with the incredible cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong (“ Burning ,” “Snowpiercer”) and an A-list design team, Bong's film is captivating with every single composition. The clean, empty spaces of the Park home contrasted against the tight quarters of the Kim living arrangement isn’t just symbolic, it’s visually stimulating without ever calling attention to itself. And there’s a reason the Kim apartment is halfway underground—they’re caught between worlds, stuck in the growing chasm between the haves and the have nots.

"Parasite" is a marvelously entertaining film in terms of narrative, but there’s also so much going on underneath about how the rich use the poor to survive in ways that I can’t completely spoil here (the best writing about this movie will likely come after it’s released). Suffice to say, the wealthy in any country survive on the labor of the poor, whether it’s the housekeepers, tutors, and drivers they employ, or something much darker. Kim's family will be reminded of that chasm and the cruelty of inequity in ways you couldn’t possibly predict. 

The social commentary of "Parasite" leads to chaos, but it never feels like a didactic message movie. It is somehow, and I’m still not even really sure how, both joyous and depressing at the same time. Stick with me here. "Parasite" is so perfectly calibrated that there’s joy to be had in just experiencing every confident frame of it, but then that’s tempered by thinking about what Bong is unpacking here and saying about society, especially with the perfect, absolutely haunting final scenes. It’s a conversation starter in ways we only get a few times a year, and further reminder that Bong Joon-ho is one of the best filmmakers working today. You’ve never seen a movie quite like “Parasite.” Dammit. I tried to avoid it. This time it's true.

This review was filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7th.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Parasite (2019)

132 minutes

Song Kang-Ho as Kim Ki-taek

Lee Sun-Kyun as Park Dong-ik

Cho Yeo-jeong as Yeon-kyo ( Mr. Park's wife )

Choi Woo-shik as Ki-woo ( Ki-taek's son )

Park So-dam as Ki-jung ( Ki-taek's daughter )

Lee Jung-eun as Moon-gwang

Chang Hyae-jin as Chung-sook ( Ki-taek's wife )

• Bong Joon-ho

Director of Photography

• Hong Kyung-pyo

Original Music Composer

• Jung Jae-il
• Yang Jin-mo
• Han Jin-won

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Parasite (Telugu)

The critically acclaimed movie 'Parasite' won numerous awards, including four Oscars at the 92nd Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film. The impoverished Kim family schemes its way into the lives of the wealthy Park family, but their easy life is threatened when they discover a hidden secret beneath the luxurious home. The film stars Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo Jeong and Park So-dam.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Parasite’ Review: The Lower Depths Rise With a Vengeance

In Bong Joon Ho’s new film, a destitute family occupies a wealthy household in an elaborate scheme that goes comically — then horribly — wrong.

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‘Parasite' | Anatomy of a Scene

The director bong joon ho narrates a sequence from his film..

“Hello, this is Bong Joon Ho, director of ‘Parasite.’ This is the story about infiltration. One family infiltrates to other family. This is in the middle of that process. —that kind of moment.” “Simply speaking, it’s just something like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ the TV series when I was a little kid. I was a huge fan. And this some kind of nerdy family version of ‘Mission: Impossible.’” “In this moment for the young son, he is kind of manipulator. He controls everything. And he has a plan. When they rehearse, it looks like a kind of filmmaking. It is like the son is director, the father is the actor.” “I intentionally shoot those shots very quickly and some very spontaneous reaction and sudden, small, improvised. And something happened very naturally. Rolling the camera, that kind of momentary feeling is very important.”

By Manohla Dargis

Midway through the brilliant and deeply unsettling “Parasite,” a destitute man voices empathy for a family that has shown him none. “They’re rich but still nice,” he says, aglow with good will. His wife has her doubts. “They’re nice because they’re rich,” she counters. With their two adult children, they have insinuated themselves into the lives of their pampered counterparts. It’s all going so very well until their worlds spectacularly collide, erupting with annihilating force. Comedy turns to tragedy and smiles twist into grimaces as the real world splatters across the manicured lawn.

The story takes place in South Korea but could easily unfold in Los Angeles or London. The director Bong Joon Ho ( “Okja” ) creates specific spaces and faces — outer seamlessly meets inner here — that are in service to universal ideas about human dignity, class, life itself. With its open plan and geometric shapes, the modernist home that becomes the movie’s stage (and its house of horrors) looks as familiar as the cover of a shelter magazine. It’s the kind of clean, bright space that once expressed faith and optimism about the world but now whispers big-ticket taste and privilege.

“Space and light and order,” Le Corbusier said, are as necessary as “bread or a place to sleep.” That’s a good way of telegraphing the larger catastrophe represented by the cramped, gloomy and altogether disordered basement apartment where Kim Ki-taek (the great Song Kang Ho) benignly reigns. A sedentary lump (he looks as if he’s taken root), Ki-taek doesn’t have a lot obviously going for him. But he has a home and the affection of his wife and children, and together they squeeze out a meager living assembling pizza boxes for a delivery company. They’re lousy at it, but that scarcely matters as much as the petty humiliations that come with even the humblest job.

The Kims’ fortunes change after the son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik), lands a lucrative job as an English-language tutor for the teenage daughter, Da-hye (Jung Ziso), of the wealthy Park family. The moment that he walks up the quiet, eerily depopulated street looking for the Park house it’s obvious we’re not idling in the lower depths anymore. Ki-woo crosses the threshold into another world, one of cultivated sensitivities and warmly polished surfaces that are at once signifiers of bourgeois success and blunt reproaches to his own family’s deprivation. For him, the house looks like a dream, one that his younger sister and parents soon join by taking other jobs in the Park home.

Take being the operative word. The other Kims don’t secure their positions as art tutor, housekeeper and chauffeur, they seize them, using lies and charm to get rid of the Parks’ other employees — including a longtime housekeeper (a terrifically vivid Lee Jung Eun) — in a guerrilla incursion executed with fawning smiles. The Parks make it easy (no background checks). Yet they’re not gullible, as Ki-taek believes, but are instead defined by cultivated helplessness, the near-infantilization that money affords. In outsourcing their lives, all the cooking and cleaning and caring for their children, the Parks are as parasitical as their humorously opportunistic interlopers.

Bong’s command of the medium is thrilling. He likes to move the camera, sometimes just to nudge your attention from where you think it should be, but always in concert with his restlessly inventive staging. When, in an early scene, the Kims crowd their superior from the pizza company, their bodies nearly spilling out of the frame, the image both underscores the family’s closeness and foreshadows their collective assault on the Parks. Nothing if not a rigorous dialectician, Bong refuses to sentimentalize the Kims’ togetherness or their poverty. But he does pointedly set it against the relative isolation of the Parks, who don’t often share the same shot much less the same room.

Bong has some ideas in “Parasite,” but the movie’s greatness isn’t a matter of his apparent ethics or ethos — he’s on the side of decency — but of how he delivers truths, often perversely and without an iota of self-serving cant. (He likes to get under your skin, not wag his finger.) He accents the rude comedy of the Kims’ struggle with slyness and precision timing, encouraging your laughter. When the son and daughter can’t locate a Wi-Fi signal — the family has been tapping a neighbor’s — they find one near the toilet (an apt tribute to the internet). And when a cloud of fumigation billows in from outside, an excited Ki-taek insists on keeping the windows open to take advantage of the free insecticide. They choke, you laugh. You also squirm.

The lightly comic tone continues after the Kims begin working for the Parks, despite ripples of unease that develop into riptides. Some of this disquiet is expressed in the dialogue, including through the Kims’ performative subservience, with its studied courtesies and strategic hedging. (Bong shares script credit with Han Jin Won.) The poor family quickly learns what the rich family wants to hear. For their part, Mr. and Mrs. Park (Lee Sun Kyun and Cho Yeo Jeong) speak the language of brutal respectability each time they ask for something (a meal, say) or deploy a metaphor, as when he gripes about people who “cross the line” and smell like “old radishes.”

The turning point comes midway through when the Parks leave on a camping trip, packing up their Range Rover, outdoor projector included. In their absence, the Kims bring out the booze, kick back and take over the house, a break that’s cut short when the old housekeeper returns, bringing a surprise with her. The slapstick becomes more violent, the stakes more naked, the laughs more terrifying and cruel. By that point, you are as comfortably settled in as the Kims; the house is so very pleasant, after all. But the cost of that comfort and those pretty rooms — and the eager acquiescence to the unfairness and meanness they signify — comes at a terrible price.

Rated R for class exploitation and bloody violence. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours and 12 minutes.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Parasite review – a gasp-inducing masterpiece

In Bong Joon-ho’s flawless tragicomedy, a poor yet united family bluff their way into the lives of a wealthy Seoul household

T he ideal way to experience South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho ’s awards-garlanded, international box-office smash is with as little prior knowledge as possible. So if you’re reading this before seeing the film, and you’ve managed to avoid the whirlwind of publicity it has attracted since winning the Palme d’Or last May, it may be simpler to just stop and head straight to the cinema. Because, at the risk of adding to the hype, Parasite really is the kind of remarkable experience that makes modern movie-going such a joy. I saw it for the fourth time last week and I’m now desperate to view the black-and-white version that Bong recently unveiled at the Rotterdam film festival.

Described by its creator as “a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains”, Parasite is more Shakespearean than Hitchockian – a tale of two families from opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, told with the trademark genre-fluidity that has seen Bong ’s back catalogue slip seamlessly from murder mystery, via monster movie, to dystopian future-fantasy and beyond. We first meet the Kim family, headed by father Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and mother Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin), in their lowly semi-basement home, hunting for stray wifi coverage and leaving their windows open to benefit from bug-killing street fumigation. They have nothing but one another and a shared sense of hard-scrabble entrepreneurism. So when son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is faced with an unexpected opportunity to home-tutor a rich schoolgirl, he gets his gifted artist sister, Ki-jung (Park So-dam), to forge a college certificate, bluffing his way into the job and into the home of the Park family.

An architectural wonder perched high above the slums of Seoul, with views not of urinating drunks but of luxurious lawns and starlit skies, this wealthy house is everything the Kims’ pokey dwelling is not: elegant, angular and weirdly isolated. While aloof businessman Mr Park (Lee Sun-kyun) is at work, his anxious, uptight wife, Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), tends to their coquettish daughter and hyperactive young son. It’s a lifestyle that relies upon hired help: tutors, a chauffeur and, most importantly, a devoted housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), who stayed with the building after its original architect owner moved out. Spying an opening, Ki-woo (newly dubbed “Kevin”) realises that his own family could easily fill such roles, and hatches a plan that will inveigle the Kims into the privileged lives and home of the Parks.

Beyond the deliberate ambiguity of the title (which, like Jordan Peele’s oddly comparable Us , cuts both ways), Bong once again foregrounds a distrust of wealth and authority that has been a recurrent feature of his work since his 2003 breakout Memories of Murder , continuing through films as diverse as The Host , Mother , Okja and, of course, Snowpiercer , to which Parasite contains several knowing nods.

The Kim family may live in sewage-flooded squalor, but they are clearly every bit as smart as, and a lot more united than, the Parks, who turn their noses up at the smell of “people who ride the subway”. Similarly, while the smug Mr Park is habitually depicted ascending the stairs of his ultra-modern home, and the Kims are pictured scampering down city steps to their own underworld apartment, it’s clear who holds the dramatic high ground.

When it comes to deception, too, those on the upper rungs of the societal ladder are as practised as those upon whom they look down. In a world of vertical non-integration, Parasite finds gasp-inducing depths lurking beneath even the most apparently placid surfaces. Yet Bong is careful to keep his opposing forces keenly balanced, creating the cinematic equivalent of a Rorschach inkblot test in which the audience is invited to decide for themselves the precise meaning of these strangely symmetrical apparitions.

Perfectly accompanying the film’s tonal shifts is Jung Jae-il’s magnificently modulated music, which moves from the sombre piano patterns of the curtain-raiser, through the mini symphony of The Belt of Faith to the cracked craziness of cues in which choric vocals do battle with a musical saw. Just as the action can segue from slapstick to horror and back – sometimes within the space of a single scene – so Jung plays things straight even as madness beckons, ensuring that the underlying elements of pathos are amplified rather than undercut by pastiche.

For me, Parasite is best described as a melancholy ghost story, albeit one disguised beneath umpteen layers of superbly designed (and impeccably photographed) generic mutations. Thrillingly played by a flawless ensemble cast who hit every note and harmonic resonance of Bong and co-writer Han Jin-won’s multitonal script, it’s a tragicomic masterclass that will get under your skin and eat away at your cinematic soul.

• Mark Kermode's film of the week
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Parasite Reviews

Parasite is the movie we will look back on as the movie of 2019. It crosses over to every culture because it’s simply about human beings struggling to survive in an unfair system.

Full Review | Apr 4, 2024

It is sadistic, angry and dark and has a lot to say about the system. This is the world we live in.

Full Review | Aug 11, 2023

"Parasite" has already made history for South Korea as the country's first film to win a Best Picture Academy Award. There are some moments I can't wrap my head around though, and one of them was the inclusion of Illinois State into the dialogue.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 28, 2023

Cinematography, score, editing… everything’s absolutely perfect. Nothing is placed without purpose. Not a single line of dialogue is wasted. It would be a shame if anyone fails to watch this magnificent movie just because it’s in a foreign language.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 24, 2023

Radically different films such as Knives Out, Us and Joker ... have all expressed the same social criticism. Parasite is perhaps the most pointed, explicitly showing how economic inequality brings out the worst in everyone, rich and poor alike.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

Bong Joon Ho’s many-sided, dark social satire is a cunning and resourceful commentary on South Korea’s economic inequality. Why it works is the relevance of that system across societies of every nation.

Full Review | Jun 14, 2023

These tiny details underline the inherent horror, and concur with the genre-defying essence of the story...

Full Review | May 15, 2023

Parasite will move you like nothing else.

Full Review | Mar 31, 2023

It is the last good thing that has happened since the shutdown...

Full Review | Mar 1, 2023

Visually stunning and searing satire...

Full Review | Dec 7, 2022

Incredible storytelling and examination of the class structure in Korea... Strong characterisation and performances create empathy from audiences, themselves becoming parasites to the film as host. Clinging on for dear life until the thrilling conclusion.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 12, 2022

Delicate directing and immaculate production design make Parasite the masterpiece it is. Its social-study script belongs in a lab, as it comes with storytelling lessons that transcend language. Reason why it became universal. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Oct 21, 2022

With a delicious black comedy edge, some surprising jolts of heartfelt emotion, and a violent throat punch when you’re least expecting it, “Parasite” is a movie that keeps you engaged and guessing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

Here is a dark comedy from the great Bong Joon-Ho about class warfare that, depending on your mood, you may find to be a work of genius or too self-indulgent. One thing is certain, you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 20, 2022

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a wryly detailed and superbly scripted portrait of contemporary class rage.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2022

This is a filmmaker working at the top of his game, aided by brilliant satirical writing that feels as culturally relevant as it is emotionally resonant. It is a flawless knockout in every sense of the word.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jun 14, 2022

Though Bong calls Parasite a "tragicomedy" and layers the material with lively humor and his signature tonal playfulness, it's also his most furious and most fatalistic picture to date.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 23, 2022

Bong Joon-ho has created something with Parasite thats darkly humorous, compelling, dramatic, poignant, and bittersweet all at the same time.

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Feb 14, 2022

Episode 52: Jojo Rabbit / The Lighthouse / Parasite

Full Review | Original Score: 96/100 | Dec 1, 2021

A twist-laden narrative that effortlessly shapeshifts from comedy to drama to thriller with liquid ease.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Sep 7, 2021

Parasite Movie Review: An incisive commentary on class couched in captivating cinema

Rating: ( 4 / 5).

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite , the most celebrated film of last year, has finally opened in India. And all the accolades it is receiving are well-deserved indeed. The first of these was Palme d'Or at Cannes, where it premiered. The film — particularly its first act — reminded me of the Palme d'Or winner of the year before, Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters . Both films are about impoverished families employing questionable means to make a living. While in Kore-eda's film a group of unconnected people come together and posing as a family, Parasite has members of a family pretend to be unrelated in order to hoodwink their way into the employ of a wealthy family. The tones of the two films, however, are quite disparate. Kore-eda's film is all tenderness and compassion. Bong, on the other hand, gives us a darkly comic thriller. 

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Producers: Kwak Sin-ae, Moon Yang-kwon, Bong Joon-ho, Jang Young-hwan

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Chang Hyae-jin

This isn't the only difference between the two. In Shoplifters , Kore-eda trains his empathetic eye at one specific group of people, while Parasite is more about society at large and the inequalities inherent in our world. This isn't to say that Bong is indifferent to his characters. Nor does he short-change them ( Parasite has one of the best ensembles in recent memory, and Bong makes excellent use of them). He is just more objective, and perhaps cynical, in his view of them. But he does not blame any of them individually for their flaws, nor praise their virtues. They are all products of the system. As Chung-sook, the mother, says of the lady who employs them, "[She is] not 'rich, but still nice'. [Rather,] nice because she is rich." Money, she says, is an iron that smoothes out all the creases in rich people. "I'd be nice too if I had all this money." The truth of the statement cannot be gainsaid. 

There is often a tendency in fiction to make the poor and disadvantaged out to be saints. They are shown to be more kind, especially to those below them in the social order. Ditto for women as opposed to men. Parasite breaks with convention. Kim Ki-taek, the father, is the one who spares a thought for the driver he has replaced. His daughter shuts him up fast and tells him to focus on them instead. Chung-sook, too, is not very sympathetic to the plight of the housekeeper whose place she has taken. "Don't call me sis!" she tells her, when the latter tries to appeal for kindness. Not long after, the tables turn and Chung-sook is treated to the same line. Even among the downtrodden, there's a hierarchy. You may be stomped upon but you are standing on someone's shoulder too. And when you're at the bottom and want to survive, you can't be too nice. 

Should you choose to ignore the social commentary, Parasite will still prove to be a thoroughly satisfying film. Bong's screenplay is taut, original, and keeps us guessing till the very end. But it's the layers in it that make Parasite so original and the love it is receiving so reassuring. While Bong's incisive look at class conflict is centred in the local milieu of Seoul, it applies universally. He lays bare curse of capitalism and the ever-widening gap it breeds between the haves and the have-nots. A rain that completely upends the lives of the poor is counted as a blessing by the rich ("The sky's so blue and there's no pollution!").

In such a situation, aspiration to overcome one's circumstances and lack of privilege and climb higher might seem like a natural response. Particularly, to those of us already blessed with privilege — privilege to set our sights higher, if not that of being born at the top already. In Parasite , it's the son, Kim Ki-woo, who has this aspiration. Though he initially terms himself a loser, once his friend tells him he can teach 10 times better than college boys, while he hasn't even been to one, Ki-woo realises this is true. And when he prints out a forged university certificate, he assures his father he will go to that university the following year and has only printed out the document a bit early. He's also the one who starts daydreaming about living in the house of the wealthy family. His sister, Kim Ki-jeong, on the other hand, is much more pragmatic. When he asks her which room she'd want if they lived there, she shoots back, "Get me the house first. Then I'll think about it." It might seem cynical, but there's wisdom in her approach too. 

The second act of Parasite ends with a brilliant sequence of the Kim family stealing away from the Park house to their own. They make their way from the wealthy neighbourhood down to the nether regions of the city where they live, quite literally. They have to climb down innumerable stairs to get to their own locality. It serves as a rich reminder of just how wide the gap is and how incredibly difficult their climb up the social ladder will be. The film also gives us a character who has tried to make this climb, only to fall lower in the process (again, notice where he lives). It is easy to ask people at the bottom to work hard and make their way up. But, when the odds are this high, shouldn't we stop to consider if it is really fair to do so?

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Home » Reviews

Parasite Movie Review: Bong Joon Ho’s Socio-Commentary Is The Metaphorical Ode That Our Society Needs The Most & Cinephiles Deserve

Parasite is a master class of how to weave an idea into a narrative that speaks to not just the language it is made in but the globe as one..

Star Cast: Kang-ho Song, Sun-kyun Lee, Yo-jeong Jo, Woo-sik Choi, So-dam Park, Hey-jin Jang and Jeong-Eun Lee.

Director: Bong Joon Ho.

What’s Good: With every frame a metaphor and each scene a twist, transcending borders, Parasite is Bong Joon Ho’s best and the most hard-hitting socio-commentary that the world has seen through cinema at least in this decade.

What’s Bad: If you don’t watch it.

Loo Break: You won’t need any if you snooze you will lose.

Watch or Not?: WATCH! You are missing on a film that will shatter you, move you and leave you with a thoughtful question if you don’t go for this one.

What can one say about the film that has already won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2019? Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite is a metaphorical commentary on the social-economic strata that talks about the haves and the have nots while telling you a thrilling story and one like no other.

Parasite talks about two families majorly, the Parks and the Kims. Kims live in a semi-basement (half above the ground and half below) which isn’t completely cut off from the world. Struggling to make living the Kim family is striving hard to earn and live their dream life. A coupe lands Kim’s son a job with the wealthy Park’s, who then hatches other plans to bring his complete family as the serving staff in the rich household. The Kim’s have now taken over all the jobs including a tutor, the Art teacher, driver and the household without letting the Park’s know that they are a family.

The Park’s are everything that Kim’s are not. They have a fine mansion (modern palace would be the right term), money, respect but are cut out from the world that is outside their mansion to a level where they are dumb enough to be fooled. What happens when these two worlds collide is the film?

Parasite Movie Review: Script Analysis

Where should I begin? Aptly described by Bong Joon Ho as “a comedy without clowns and a tragedy without villains”, Parasite is a master class of how to weave an idea into a narrative that speaks to not just the language it is made in but the globe as one.

Parasite wins the game just with its title. According to the dictionary, Parasite means, “an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other’s expense.” And the film is just that. Though it does not tell you who the parasite is at any stage, it is you who is the judge, it clearly tells you the stark reality you are living in.

The script never terms anyone a villain. The Kim’s may be poor but they are clever and cunning to make their ends meet. The rich Park’s who own almost everything that the Kim’s don’t, are coil, to an extent dumb. They do have their boundaries set for the people below their economic strata but they blurred somewhere and hail the God Bong Joon Ho is, he uses the mere smell/odour to show you how these lines are blurred. It is a scene where the Kim couple is discussing the odour of the people driving by the subway when the husband defines it as “Like a rag that has been boiled.” You instantly know the height of the wall that the rich have built so that the poor don’t infiltrate their society. But at the end of the day, the poor do, and what happens when the infiltrate is Parasite.

The script knows the story it is telling. While the rich have their first world problems, it is the middle and the under poverty strata that are fighting with each other to oppress the other. Moral of the story, the oppressing opens the gates of irritation (in the film there is actually a flood) and the most oppressed turns into an animal killing every other contender there possibly is. Watch the film to understand.

Parasite Movie Review: Star Performance

Bringing in the perfect nuance needed is the cast of the film. The conviction to play characters that are clueless about their next plans but are full of hope that they will be the winners, the cast of Parasite does the job to the utmost perfection. Actors Kang-ho Song, Sun-kyun Lee, Yo-jeong Jo, Woo-Sik Choi, So-dam Park, Hey-jin Jang and Jeong-Eun Lee all deserve a mention and an ovation.

Parasite Movie Review: Direction, Music

Bong Joon Ho clearly needs no more validation. The director is in full control of his art and at no point lets any tread fall lose. Though he tells you different variation the title of the film but never tells you who the Parasite is.

Who is the Parasite? The Park’s, who are clueless about the world that is outside their high gates, or the Kim’s who have infiltrated the Park household? Or Kim’s dream for a better life that has eaten their senses to see what is wrong or right? Or the lowest basement dwellers who have been exploiting the rich secretly like the rodents?

All of this is bonded by powerful background music that transits from happy, to mysterious, to suspensive but keeping in mind the thrilling melancholy that is always present.

Parasite Movie Review: Production Design:

The production design of the film is research in itself. The set bifurcates the three-levels by placing them in a huge spacious mansion at the top of the city, to a semi-basement that is almost ruined, to the lowest basement that has never been touched by sunlight ever. Also, the film connects the metaphors by lots and lots of stairs. Stair to the basement, stairs going to the mansion. Stairs going down to the township of the poor that is placed at such low level where all the garbage is bound to flow when the flood gates open. If a viewer is not into metaphors, the sets do the job and it is commendable.

The mansion that the Park’s live in is the most immaculate set we have seen in recent times.

Parasite Movie Review: The Last Word

Watch Parasite and you must. Witness what magic cinema is capable of and the spellbound art that it can create. Go for it!

Five stars!

Parasite trailer.

Parasite releases on 11th October, 2019.

Share with us your experience of watching Parasite.

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Need to watch ' Parasite ' on your TV or mobile device at home? Discovering a streaming service to buy, rent, download, or view the Bong Joon-ho-directed movie via subscription can be challenging, so we here at Moviefone want to do right by you. Read on for a listing of streaming and cable services - including rental, purchase, and subscription choices - along with the availability of 'Parasite' on each platform when they are available. Now, before we get into all the details of how you can watch 'Parasite' right now, here are some specifics about the Barunson E&A thriller flick. Released August 30th, 2019, 'Parasite' stars Song Kang-ho , Lee Sun-kyun , Cho Yeo-jeong , Choi Woo-shik The R movie has a runtime of about 2 hr 13 min, and received a user score of 85 (out of 100) on TMDb, which compiled reviews from 17,507 respected users. Interested in knowing what the movie's about? Here's the plot: "All unemployed, Ki-taek's family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks for their livelihood until they get entangled in an unexpected incident." 'Parasite' is currently available to rent, purchase, or stream via subscription on Apple iTunes, Amazon Video, Vudu, YouTube, Microsoft Store, Spectrum On Demand, HBO Max Amazon Channel, Google Play Movies, Max , and AMC on Demand .

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