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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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10 reasons why Parasite is so excellent

By Joshua Rivera

1. For a certain type of person, urgency will be enough. I will attempt that here. If you read writers because you trust them, allow me to thank you – I’m flattered, truly – and then implore you: Parasite , the new film from Korean director Bong Joon-ho , is a tremendous work that might be the most pleasurable experience you have in a movie theatre this year. It’s so top-to-bottom satisfying that even being completely spoiled couldn’t ruin it – but if you can come to it cold, you’ll be floored. Don’t even watch a trailer. Trust me, and go.

2. If you must know more – there will be no spoilers – the premise is simple enough. The Kim family, underemployed and eager for any opportunity to scrape together a little more cash, aren’t having the best time of things. Kim Ki-taek, the patriarch, is an unemployed driver. Together with his wife and two children, the family does odd jobs, such as folding pizza boxes. Then, an opportunity falls into his son Ki-woo’s lap when a friend offers to recommend Ki-woo to replace him as an English tutor to the daughter of the extremely wealthy Park family. Once he settles into his posh new job, Ki-woo gets an idea: What if he can trick the Parks into hiring his entire family?

3. Bong Joon-ho makes movies that ruin other movies for you. His films disregard the boundaries of genre; their characters resist familiar archetypes. Each one – be it the monster movie The Host , the science fiction thriller Snowpiercer, or the strange drama Okja – begins with one ostensible set of rules before discarding them one at a time in a way that should be disorienting. Instead, you wonder why we bother with rules at all.

4. Parasite is a movie about illusions, which is to say, it is about class and wealth. In watching it, you’ll begin to anticipate some of its jabs, and assume the direction in which it will cut. Maybe you’ll be right, for a little while. And then you won’t be.

5. Before we continue, it’s worth underlining in red ink: This movie is funny. Wickedly so. Parasite spares no one in its criticism, it dresses down every target with withering wit and ease. It’s also tense, thoughtful, humane, and perhaps frightening. If there is a feeling that a movie can elicit from us, odds are Parasite does so.

6. Much of Parasite ’s magic comes from the clever ways it puts the wealthy in intimate proximity with the sort of poor people that aren’t supposed to interact with them. Is the Kim family cheating with their gambit to become upwardly mobile? Can the Parks even be honest people with such wealth? “Money,” as one character notes, “irons out all the wrinkles”.

7. Watching this film, I think of the professors and employers and fathers of girlfriends I have stood in front of and listened to as they compliment me on being so articulate and well-spoken. I had stepped across a threshold they did not expect someone like me to haunt, and they had sized me up, and deemed me acceptable. The part that no one ever talks about is the one where I’ve sized them up too, and decided they were suckers just waiting to hear the right author mentioned, the right album, the right headlines. But that’s okay. They’re supposed to have the power in this story, and I can let them have it.

8. Maybe if the playing field was truly level we’d all eat each other just the same.

9. Few things in Parasite are as abundantly evident as the way money rewires the brains of those who have it in excess as well as those in desperate need. Wealth buys you out of the social contract – the need to behave a certain way, to tolerate others. Poverty imposes more rules, limitations and boundaries that, if unchecked, will suffocate. There is conflict in this – the wealthy become acutely aware of the inconvenience of empathy; the poor laugh darkly at those who plan for the future. “With no plan,” Ki-taek says late in the film, “nothing can go wrong… and nothing fucking matters.”

10. At one point in the film, Ki-woo gets a gift. It’s a beautiful, decorative stone that barely fits in his family’s cramped basement apartment, prone to exposure from both fumigators and pissing drunks alike. Despite his lack of space or use for it, Ki-woo quietly holds it in high regard, keeping it with him throughout the film despite its sheer size and weight. “This stone,” Ki-woo says. “It keeps clinging to me.” And then I felt a familiar fracture in my chest for envying that same stability, playing the same song for the same set of people, knowing that the game is rigged and always will be. After a while, it becomes exhausting, envying the wealthy. And accommodating them.

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Parasite review – searing satire of a family at war with the rich

Members of an unemployed family target a wealthy household in Bong Joon-ho’s superbly written, horribly fascinating comedy-drama

I n all its delicious cruelty and ingenuity, Bong Joon-ho’s satirical suspense thriller Parasite has arrived in the UK from Korea, having won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last year and dominated the connoisseur conversation from then on – at the expense, rightly or wrongly, of every other non-English-language film.

This really is a horribly fascinating film, brilliantly written, superbly furnished and designed, with a glorious ensemble cast put to work in an elegantly plotted nightmare. Its narrative engine hums with the luxurious smoothness of the Mercedes-Benz that one character is fatefully given the chance to drive. In my original review from Cannes , I wondered if the narrative was a little over-extended, but, on a second viewing, I can see how that amplitude of detail is what gives the film its flavour.

Parasite is a scabrous black comedy-slash-farce that resonates beyond its generic limits – a movie about status envy, aspiration, materialism, the patriarchal family unit and the idea of having (or leasing) servants. More than this, it is about the suppressed horror of the overclass for its underlings and its morbid distaste for the smell of people who have to use public transport. The satirical reflex extends to a vision of South and North Korea living together in paranoid, resentful intimacy, and its climax is precipitated by an almost Biblical climate-emergency catastrophe.

The parasites in question are a dodgy unemployed family living together in a scuzzy, stinky basement flat, with the teenage son and daughter periodically roaming around, holding their smartphones up to the ceiling to pinch the non-password-protected wifi of neighbours and nearby businesses. The dad is Ki-taek (a lovely performance from veteran player Song Kang-ho), a laidback loafer married to former track star Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin). The son is Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik), a shiftless young guy who has flunked the university entrance exams; and the daughter is Ki-jung (Park So-dam), a smart, cool customer with an artistic gift for web-based fraud.

One summer, by posing as a college student, Ki-woo gets the chance to tutor the teenage daughter of a very rich family in a spectacularly grand modernist house, owned by business high-flier Mr Park (Lee Sun-kyun). Ki-woo’s student is the demure Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), whose instant crush on him is something Ki-woo does nothing to discourage. The somewhat distraite mistress of the house, Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), asks if this smart young man might also recommend an art tutor for Da-hye’s negligibly talented kid brother Da-song (Jung Hyun-jun). He passes off his sister as the cousin of a friend and her brazen grifter-sense of when and how to be confident, and even arrogant, bags her the job.

Soon, these wicked kids have cunningly contrived to get the family chauffeur fired and replaced with their dad. They then dislodge the housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jeong-eun) and install their placidly smiling mum. A whole family of cuckoos in a brand new nest, pretending to be strangers to each other. But then the artless little kid points out that they all smell alike – and they smell of poor people.

Parasite is a movie that taps into a rich cinematic tradition of unreliable servants with an intimate knowledge of their employers, an intimacy that easily, and inevitably, congeals into hostility. Joseph Losey’s The Servant invokes a comparable transgression, nightmarishly amplified here by the subterfuge and by the sheer numbers of people getting up close and personal.

Parasite is also in a Korean tradition of pictures such as Kim Ki-young’s classic thriller The Housemaid from 1960, remade in 2010 by Im Sang-soo, and also Park Chan-wook’s servant-class con-trick drama, The Handmaiden . A second viewing of this film also put me in mind of the claustrophobic horror in Park’s Oldboy .

And there is something else, too. The Park family love to play Handel on the music system in their lovely home – the Spietati, io vi giurai aria from his opera Rodelinde. It is so expansive, so airy, caressingly sumptuous and wealthy, and not a million miles from the Care selve arioso from Handel’s Atalanta – listened to by the smug wealthy couple in Michael Haneke’s home-invasion horror Funny Games , before their own appointment with dark destiny.

The home invaders here gaze on their super-rich employers and see themselves in a distorting mirror that pitilessly reveals to them how wretched they are and shows them what could and should be theirs. It is almost a supernatural or sci-fi story: the invasion of the lifestyle snatchers. Parasite gets its toxic tendrils into your skin.

• Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
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Review: Thrilling and devastating, ‘Parasite’ is one of the year’s very best movies

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The first thing you see in Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” a thriller of extraordinary cunning and emotional force, is an upper window in a tiny underground apartment. From this high, narrow vantage the Kims, a resilient family of four, peer onto a grubby Seoul street strewn with garbage bags and electrical wires — an ugly view made worse by a drunk who often turns up to relieve himself right outside. Sometime later the Kims will stand before a much larger window, as big and beautiful as a cinema screen, in an enormous house with a gorgeous sunlit garden. It’s not just a different view; it’s a different world.

From the outset of this deviously entertaining movie, which recently became the first South Korean film to win the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes, every detail of the Kims’ hardscrabble existence is on blunt display. In an early scene, high school graduate Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik) and his sister, Ki-jung (Park So Dam), scurry around their cramped bathroom with their phones held aloft, hunting for a free Wi-Fi signal. You register the clutter of their apartment with its discarded clothes, mildewed tiles and skittering stinkbugs. You watch the Kims fold and assemble pizza boxes for a nearby restaurant, the closest any of them has recently come to landing a job.

But you also notice the close bonds between brother and sister, as well as the easy rapport they share with their boisterous father, Ki-taek (Song Kang Ho), and sharp-witted mother, Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin). Living together in close quarters has bred in them a matter-of-fact intimacy and a wily self-sufficiency.

Bong has never been one to ennoble or romanticize his characters’ poverty, but he does invest them with a terrific rooting interest. “Parasite,” with its tough, unsentimental view of people doing what they must to survive, initially suggests an evil twin to “Shoplifters,” Hirokazu Kore-eda’s lovely drama about a family of petty thieves (which, incidentally, won the Palme last year).

From ‘Knives Out’ to ‘Parasite’: Why movies are tackling income inequality and class warfare

In a range of fall releases, including “Joker,” “Parasite,” “Hustlers” and “Knives Out,” major movies take on issues of class and income inequality

Oct. 7, 2019

But the movie swiftly establishes its own unpredictable agenda not long after Ki-woo inherits an English tutoring job from a college-student friend (Park Seo Joon). The pupil in question is an upper-class teenage girl, Park Da-hye (Jung Ziso), and their lessons will take place in the gated modernist fortress she calls home. Ki-woo just barely manages to keep a lid on his awe the first time the Parks’ formidable housekeeper, Moon-gwang (Lee Jung Eun), ushers him inside. Designed and formerly inhabited by a famous architect, the house is a masterwork of real-estate pornography with its beige walls, marble floors and vast, cavernous spaces.

But it is also a warren of secrets, full of telling details that Bong, a superb storyteller and a master of camera movement, unwraps with elegance and economy. (The cinematography is by Hong Kyung Pyo.) He calls your attention to the toy arrows fired by Da-hye’s younger brother, Da-song (Jung Hyeon Jun), and also to a framed magazine article about her father, Dong-ik (Lee Sun Kyun), a millionaire tech titan. But no one embodies the family’s glossy pretensions more nakedly than Dong-ik’s wife, Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo Jeong), whether she’s idly stroking one of the family’s three dogs or peppering her everyday speech with English affectations.

Yeon-kyo’s breezy entitlement hides a naive, nervous streak, and Cho’s performance suggests just how gullible and vulnerable the very rich can be behind their high-tech security systems. When Yeon-kyo lets drop that her mischief-making young son is in need of an art tutor, Ki-woo, thinking fast, suggests a distant acquaintance for the job — and, within days, has succeeded in installing his sister in the house as well. Ki-jung, the most intuitive grifter in a family full of them, shows up with a coolly professional demeanor and a mouth full of therapeutic gobbledygook. (She got it all from Google, she later announces to her family’s amusement.)

The Kims enjoy their sudden boost in income, but their ambitions — and the dramatic stakes — only escalate from there. I wouldn’t dream of disclosing the stunning, multilayered surprises that await you in “Parasite,” though it gives away nothing to note that it’s about two families on warring sides of the class divide. Certainly it says nothing about the dexterity with which Bong shuffles tones, moods and genres, or the Hitchcockian precision with which he and his co-writer, Han Jin Won, have booby-trapped their narrative. Taking cues from classics of domestic intrigue such as Kim Ki-young’s “The Housemaid” (1960) and Joseph Losey’s “The Servant” (1963), they send this domestic drama vaulting into satire, suspense, terror and full-blown tragedy.

The first hour or so of “Parasite” is simply the most dazzling movie about the joys of the con I’ve seen in years. It’s a heist thriller of the quotidian, in which no everyday object — a piece of fruit, a child’s drawing — is too trivial to be weaponized. Bong, his camera at once ecstatic and controlled, brings the pieces together with the brio of a conductor attacking a great symphony. But even as he lures us into a wicked sense of complicity with the Kims, he also suggests that they aren’t the only ones with something to hide.

As this allegory of class rage plays out, you may find yourself wondering about the exact meaning of the movie’s title. At first it seems the parasites must be the lowly Kims, who are so interdependent that they often seem less like individuals than members of a single, unified organism. (Watch the way they sometimes squat and crawl around in private, like stealthy four-legged insects — or perhaps just people accustomed to low ceilings.) But then, surely the title more truthfully describes the Parks, whose lives of extravagant luxury represent the real moral and financial scourge in a ruthless late-capitalist society.

Yet Bong refuses the crutch of an easy target. He peels back the layers of privilege to expose the tremendous sadness and patriarchal cruelty of the Park household, where Yeon-kyo lives in fear of her husband and instinctively prioritizes her son’s needs over her daughter’s. The Kims are a model of functionality and egalitarianism by comparison, and while they may covet their employers’ prosperity, there is never any real doubt here about which is the more loving, stable family unit.

Bong has never been one for uncomplicated heroes or easy villains: Think of the sympathetic grotesques Tilda Swinton played in “Snowpiercer” and “Okja,” the dystopian eco-thrillers the director made before this film. He has always had a knack for fusing genre pleasures and liberal polemics, as he did in his brilliant 2006 monster movie, “The Host.” With their cleverly linked titles and their shared star (Song, one of Korea’s best actors), “The Host” and “Parasite” feel like natural companion pieces, right down to the haunting echoes in their respective final shots: At heart, they’re both movies about downtrodden families doing what they must to survive in a cold, indifferent world.

What distinguishes “Parasite” even within Bong’s body of work is its discipline: This is a tighter, more intimately scaled picture than “Snowpiercer” and “Okja,” and it proceeds like clockwork without ever feeling airless or mechanical. That’s a tribute to the note-perfect ensemble, especially Park So Dam, Cho Yeo Jeong and the astonishing Lee Jeong Eun as three women driven to three unique states of desperation. But it’s also a tribute to a filmmaker whose understanding of the world is as persuasive in its cruelty as it is trenchant in its humanity. “Parasite” begins in exhilaration and ends in devastation, but the triumph of the movie is that it fully lives and breathes at every moment, even when you might find yourself struggling to exhale.

Best of the 2019 Toronto Film Festival: There was ‘Parasite’ and there was everything else

L.A. Times writers Glenn Whipp and Justin Chang discuss their Toronto festival highlights including “Marriage Story,” “Knives Out,” “Uncut Gems” and “The Lighthouse.”

Sept. 13, 2019

(In Korean with English subtitles) Rating: R, for language, some violence and sexual content Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes Playing: ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood, and the Landmark, West Los Angeles

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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

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Movie Reviews

Movie review: 'parasite'.

Bob Mondello

Snowpiercer director Bong Joon-ho has made a South Korean social satire that's also a genre-bending Palme d'Or-winning thriller of class struggle.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

No foreign-language film has ever opened at the numbers of a new satirical comedy that opened this past weekend. A Korean film called "Parasite" opened to record audiences in New York and LA and expands to other cities Friday. Critic Bob Mondello says no matter what audiences expect, they're likely to be surprised.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: A tale of two families, the Parks, who live in a designer house atop a hill...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MONDELLO: ...And the Kims, who live in a grungy basement apartment across town.

MONDELLO: Literally high and low, both physically and in social status, they wouldn't normally meet. But then a friend drops by the Kims' basement with a gift, a big stone that his grandfather claims will bring the family material wealth. This is so metaphorical, says 20-something Kim Ki-woo.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "PARASITE")

CHOI WOO-SHIK: (As Kim Ki-woo, speaking Korean).

MONDELLO: His mom is skeptical.

JANG HYE-JIN: (As Kim Chung-sook, speaking Korean).

MONDELLO: Food would have been better, she says. Still, the friend also brings word that the wealthy Park family needs an English tutor for their daughter, and he sets up Ki-woo with an audition for the job.

MONDELLO: Mrs. Park tells him she always sits in on the first lesson.

CHO YEO-JEONG: (As Park Yeon-kyo) If it's OK with you.

MONDELLO: Ki-woo gets the tutoring job, then starts building on what is a really good deal. The Parks pay well, so he introduces his sister - he says she's a friend of a classmate - as an art therapist for their son. Beats folding pizza boxes to earn money or leaving the window open in the Kim apartment when the city fumigates the alley it's on to get free exterminating.

MONDELLO: Money is an iron, says someone. It smooths out the wrinkles - another metaphor, and a clue that the Kim family's scam, which just seems funny at first, is more than it appears. Writer-director Bong Joon-ho never goes for just funny. His sci-fi epic "Snowpiercer," for instance, put the last survivors of a climate disaster on a train and set them to killing each other in a class war. And as the comedy starts curdling in "Parasite," class struggle is again on his mind.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) I'm deadly serious.

MONDELLO: The haves here aren't hateful. They're just insensitive. Mr. Park keeps scrunching up his nose and talking about the stench of poverty. And the have-nots aren't vicious, so much as hapless for a while. And then - well, shouldn't spoil things. Let's just say that by "Parasite's" conclusion, what started out as a comedy of manners has become a furious snarl of rage and his most arresting social satire yet.

I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF JENNY LEWIS SONG, "YOU CAN'T OUTRUN 'EM")

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‘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’ (‘gisaengchung’): film review | cannes 2019.

Korean creature-feature maestro Bong Joon-ho returns to Cannes with 'Parasite,' a dark family farce where the only monsters are human.

By Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton

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Parasite, starring Lee Sun-kyun (left) and Cho Yeo-jeong, takes a "microscopic" look at two families — one rich, one poor.

Returning to home turf after a run of international features, South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho launches a sustained attack on the lifestyles of the rich and shameless with his latest Cannes competition contender, Parasite . In previous genre-driven pieces like The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja , Bong tapped the juicy allegorical potential of sci-fi to critique the unjust nature of capitalism and class hierarchy. This time, he ditches the metaphorical layers and adopts a register closer to social realism, albeit spiced with dark satire and noir-ish thriller elements. Whatever the horror-movie connotations of that double-edged title, the morally flawed monsters in Parasite are entirely human. Bong calls the film “a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains.”

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With its focus on an impoverished family who concoct a wily scheme to boost their bleak prospects, Parasite arrives a little too soon after Hirokazu Kora-Eda’s thematically similar Japanese drama Shoplifters , which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes a year ago. Bong’s more splashy, simplistic film will likely draw unflattering parallels, but there are richer cinematic echoes in here, too. At times the plot teasingly recalls Joseph Losey’s The Servant and Pier Paolo Pasoloni’s Theorem , poison-tipped parables about cunning social outcasts staging stealth home invasions against upper-class hosts.

The Bottom Line A mostly successful detour into morally complex social realism.

Like much of Bong’s work, Parasite is cumbersomely plotted and heavy-handed in its social commentary. The largely naturalistic treatment here may also alienate some of his fantasy fanboy constituency. That said, this prickly contemporary drama still feels more coherent and tonally assured than Snowpiercer or Okja , and packs a timely punch that will resonate in our financially tough, politically polarized times. It opens May 30 in South Korea, where Bong has a consistently strong commercial track record, with more territories to follow in June. After Cannes it should also enjoy a healthy festival run, starting with Sydney on June 15. New York-based outfit Neon inked U.S. distribution rights at AFM last year.

From the opening scene, Bong sets up a stark visual contrast between the unequal social castes at play here. Disheveled patriarch Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and his family are crammed into a sunken, cluttered, bug-infested basement apartment at the end of a shabby street on the wrong side of the tracks. Ki-taek, his wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin), son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam) are all penniless and unemployed, unable to even hold down a lowly shared job folding cardboard pizza boxes. Without bad luck, they would have no luck at all.

But fortune favors the bold, especially when the bold are armed with flexible ethics and sharp forgery skills. Following a tip from a well-connected pal, Ki-woo lands a sweet job as a private tutor for Da-hye (Jung Ziso), the high-schooler daughter of wealthy corporate CEO Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun) and his glamorously vacant wife Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong). In contrast to Ki-taek’s family, the Parks live high above the city in an airy, spacious, pristine modernist mansion shielded by thick concrete walls. A quick-thinking opportunist, Ki-woo spots a chance of securing jobs for his entire clan with the Parks, playing on their snobbish aspirations like a virtuoso. The plan runs smoothly, even if it means callously displacing the family’s existing domestic staff.

In an unusually personal plea, Bong has requested Cannes reviewers not to reveal plot spoilers about the second act of Parasite . As it happens, there is not one big twist here but multiple small revelations and reverses, each ramping up the stakes. A deftly choreographed rainstorm sequence hammers home the impossibly wide gulf between high and low, rich and poor. Bong then makes the film’s class-war subtext concrete with a bloody struggle for survival that leaves no one holding the moral high ground.

Initially a little slow to set up its dynamic tension, Parasite peaks during its lively mid-section as a fast-paced, black-hearted, Coens-esque farce before climaxing with a chaotic orgy of vengeful violence. As ever, Bong’s bludgeoning attacks on economic injustice have more passion than nuance, while a superfluous coda about secret coded messages is a clumsy twist too far. A good 15 minutes of the pic’s generous two-hour-plus running time could be comfortably trimmed.

Nonetheless, Parasite is generally gripping and finely crafted, standing up well as Bong’s most mature state-of-the-nation statement since Memories of Murder in 2003. The performances are uniformly solid, with special credit due to the child and teen actors. Hong Kyung-pyo’s high-gloss cinematography combines lustrous candy-shop colors with kinetic precision, while Lee Ha-jun’s production design is typically superb, especially the elegantly minimalist Park family mansion, which serves as both deluxe fortress and sinister prison. Spliced into Jung Jaei-il’s dread-laden score, fragrant bouquets of classical music provide bustling comic counterpoint as well as wry commentary on the snooty cultural values being slowly eviscerated onscreen.

Production company: Barunson E&A Cast: Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Chang Hyae-jin, Park So-dam, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Jung Ziso, Lee Jung-em, Jung Hyeon-jun Director: Bong Joon-ho Screenwriters: Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won Producers: Jang Young-Hwan, Moon Yang-kwon, Kwak Sin-ae Cinematographer: Hong Kyung-pyo Editor: Yang Jinmo Music: Jung Jaei-il Art director: Lee Ha-jun Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Sales: CJ Entertainment

131 minutes

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Parasite (2019)

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Review by Brian Eggert November 3, 2019

From their half-basement dwelling, the Kim family looks out a narrow window onto their impoverished neighborhood in Seoul, where passers-by urinate in the street and insect foggers release noxious gases that float into homes. Inside, they dry their socks on a mobile-like hanger and fold pizza boxes for money. When they need to get a Wi-Fi signal, they hold their smartphones in the air and search their underground apartment for a signal by climbing on the toilet. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. With the family’s conditions dire, each of them, the parents and two adult children, search for an edge, which presents itself with the Park family. An upper-middle-class couple with a teenage daughter and a young boy, the Parks live in a modernist house of cold, geometric stone and austere design, elevated in a walled space and a lush, enclosed yard that feels removed from the reality of the outside world. The juxtaposition between the underclass and the advantaged, and the events that entangle these two families in Bong Joon-ho’s brilliant  Parasite , recalls a similar class and genre dynamic as the 1963 Japanese thriller High and Low . That film, directed by Akira Kurosawa, tells the story of a privileged family whose kidnapped son is held for ransom in a poor criminal’s act of class revenge. Bong’s film might be called Low and High , with its perspective situated in the sub-levels, looking up at the disparity between the rich and the less fortunate. Though, the impetus of Parasite ’s class struggle materializes in a far more surprising, unconventional way. 

But before this consideration of Bong’s film continues, a word of warning: After Parasite debuted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where it unanimously won the Palme d’Or, Bong asked that critics not reveal certain story elements. As much as any film, if not more, experiencing this remarkable picture without prior knowledge will enhance your impressions. Consider yourself warned that this assessment will explore the plot of Parasite with detail, less as a betrayal of Bong’s request than a celebration of his intricate, exhilarating film, whose many layers keep unfolding into the final shot. However, it should be noted, as ever, that criticism and review aggregators tend to set expectations, and the less you know about this film and its themes beforehand, the better. With little or no knowledge of what Parasite entails before seeing it, I was nonetheless drawn to the material because of its filmmaker—a master at blending genres and tones into a sophisticated cinema. Bong’s multifaceted approach is, to borrow a repeated line from a character in his latest, “so metaphorical,” reflecting the intricate and entangled nature of his characters and, to a greater extent, all human beings. So while seeing it unspoiled is ideal, seeing it again may be essential. 

At the film’s center are the two families, the Kims and the Parks, but as suggested, Bong aligns the viewer with the Kims’ perspective. We understand their motivations and family dynamics, whereas the Parks have a curious, if not morbid undercurrent to their lives. The Kims’ paterfamilias, Ki-taek, played by the great South Korean actor Song Kang-ho, spends his days with his family in their cramped basement abode, barely eking out an existence yet never overwhelmed by their situation. But their fortunes change when the son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), learns of a chance to work as a well-paid English tutor for the Parks’ teenage daughter, Da-hye (Jung Zi-so). When the opportunity presents itself, Ki-woo ensures his employment by enlisting his sister to forge college documents, while Ki-taek and his wife, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), look proudly on their children who have learned to survive with ingenuity and criminal cunning. Of course, Ki-woo lands the job after interviewing with the gullible Mrs. Park (Cho Yeo-jeong), who insists on calling him “Kevin” in the way some slave owners would rename their servants. Once he’s established, Ki-woo learns that the Parks’ youngest, a rambunctious boy, needs help becoming the next Basquiat. Ki-woo makes up a story about so-and-so who knows a well-respected art teacher, a role to be played by his sister, Ki-jung (Park So-dam). Before long, Ki-woo and Ki-jung have convinced the Parks to hire their entire family, while the Parks remain unaware of their true identities. But “convinced” is the wrong word. The Kims lie, cajole, and manipulate to secure Ki-taek as the chauffeur of Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun) and Chung-sook as the Park family’s maid. Rather than identifying with Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), the longtime housekeeper, out of lower-class solidarity, they’re happy to exploit her allergy to peaches to convince Mrs. Park that she has tuberculosis—a condition that quickly gets her fired. Setting up the former employees to sabotage them, the Kims stick to an elaborate plan, but their scheme is not to rob the Parks or to murder and replace them as doppelgängers, but to earn a lucrative income. At one point, Ki-taek observes that fifty college graduates compete for a lousy security guard post, so what chance does he have until he takes such a job? It’s as though one pilot fish has convinced the shark to eat his predecessor in order to replace him. Their cutthroat actions are those of a capitalist society that has made everyone desperate to accumulate more wealth, to survive and prosper, even if it means sacrificing your morality or willfully ignoring the humanity of others to attain it. Thus, the lower classes have no choice but to engage in a parasitic relationship with the more prosperous. But opportunistic as the Kims may seem, the Parks, too, are parasites, feeding off the less fortunate to supply themselves with an outsourced lifestyle. 

But then, there is  a troubling secret beneath the surface of the Park home. A sudden turn in the film arrives around the midpoint in Parasite , when the Parks leave on a camping trip and the Kims unwind in the extravagant, minimalist house. They drink expensive booze and chow-down on snacks, feeling “cozy” in their new space. But the return of the former housekeeper upsets their homey little scene. She has not returned for revenge or anything so obvious; rather, she has come to reclaim her husband, who has long evaded debt collectors by hiding in a frightening concrete sub-basement, constructed in secret by the original starchitect-owner, Namgoong, as a shelter in case of an attack by North Korea. Another parasite, Chung-sook’s husband, has lived down there for years, surviving on secret deliveries of food and supplies by his wife. The idea cannot help but bring to mind Jordan Peele’s Us from earlier this year, where a forgotten world of underground doubles emerges from below to take over the world they were supposed to control. Although, Bong’s film situates itself in the real world, where the chasm between the rich and poor continues to extend. The approach is no less thrilling, however, as the Kim family must scramble to prevent the former housekeeper from exposing them, while the space below the house serves a kind of situational timebomb.  

Bong’s deft touch as a filmmaker never forgets the emotional, purely entertaining stakes, though his formal skill is that of a mathematical technician who always knows where to place the camera. Parasite ’s careful ratcheting of tension shifts the material into a Hitchcockian suspenser, where the Kims attempt to keep another secret from the Parks—they’ve now confined the housekeeper and her husband in the sub-basement. Hong Kyung-pyo’s cinematography glides the camera around the elaborate sets, built by production designer Lee Ha-jun, so convincing in their construction that the viewer would assume the locations were real. Instead, Bong’s vision is at once intentional and chambered, each camera movement and angle the approach of a cinematic tactician. Subtle, calculated imagery such as eyes peering out from a stairway or the Kim family hiding beneath a large table as the Parks sleep on a nearby couch leave the viewer in breathless suspense, while they’re also “so metaphorical.” Likewise, so is Bong’s script, as when Mr. Park compliments his new driver for not “crossing the line”—an imaginary divide between the classes, which Bong indicates in visual space. And while often such elaborate premeditation can result in a feeling of formal coldness, Parasite develops its characters with humor and humanity in a way that recalls Alfred Hitchcock or Brian De Palma. 

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. But limiting this film to any genre definition defies the uniqueness of Bong’s filmmaking—at once laugh-out-loud funny and capable of inducing gasps, delightfully engaging yet unflinching in its social critique. Still, Parasite is Bong’s most compassionate and harrowing study of contemporary powerlessness. His other films have featured characters capable of improving their class conditions by some small, hopeful measure—the mourning father in The Host who adopts a homeless child; the escape from the train in Snowpiercer ; the survival of the superpig in Okja . But the final moments here articulate Bong’s sense that the economic hierarchies that constitute the foundation of a capitalistic society will remain in place. Moreover, Bong’s other films have handled these themes in the context of genre-inflected worlds, elaborate and comparatively escapist, but with Parasite, he confronts our modern-day dystopia that, if portrayed in a film decades ago, might not look so different than a work of science-fiction. The deep passion he feels for his subject enriches every frame of this outstanding film, a work of stealth and vision marked by its melancholy and rage.  

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Brilliant Korean social satire has dark comedy, violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Messages have complex layers, but movie asks point

While clever and often likable, most characters he

Brief scenes of intense gore. Stabbing, skewering.

A married couple engages in sexual activity on a c

Multiple uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "bitch

Mention of WhatsApp.

An entire family drinks heavily in one scene, whis

Parents need to know that Parasite is a brilliant social satire from acclaimed South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho ( Snowpiercer , The Host ). It's alternately funny, shocking, and thoughtful, but it's also quite mature. Expect a few scenes of extremely strong violence, blood, and gore, with…

Positive Messages

Messages have complex layers, but movie asks pointed questions about the rich and their tendency to insulate themselves from others' problems and the yearning of the poor to become just like the rich. The poor must scheme, ask for help to get by, but as soon as anyone gets the upper hand, they attempt to crush the poor and stop them from advancing. Why are we like this? Is it possible to change, become more aware of suffering and needs of fellow humans?

Positive Role Models

While clever and often likable, most characters here are satirical in nature. They are capable of unsavory deeds, though there are consequences.

Violence & Scariness

Brief scenes of intense gore. Stabbing, skewering. Characters fight and hit each other with blunt objects. Lots of blood. A fall down concrete stairs. A character gets a concussion; another is briefly trapped in a noose. Characters die. A character suddenly swipes all the food and drink from a table, smashing it on the floor. A man grabs his wife by her shirt in pretend anger.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A married couple engages in sexual activity on a couch; he touches her breast, and she touches his crotch, moaning and saying sex-related things. A young man kisses a teen girl. A young woman removes her underwear in the back of a car. A man grabs his wife's buttock. Strong sex talk.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Multiple uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "bitch," "piss," "screwed," "scumbag," and "oh God," all translated in the English subtitles.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

An entire family drinks heavily in one scene, whiskey and other kinds of liquor. Some of them become slurring drunk. Young character smokes cigarettes. A staggeringly drunk character urinates in an alleyway. Mentions of hard drugs (meth, cocaine).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Parasite is a brilliant social satire from acclaimed South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho ( Snowpiercer , The Host ). It's alternately funny, shocking, and thoughtful, but it's also quite mature. Expect a few scenes of extremely strong violence, blood, and gore, with stabbing, fighting, hitting with blunt objects, and death. One character gets trapped in a noose, and another is knocked down concrete stairs. English subtitles include multiple uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "bitch," and more. A married couple gets frisky on a couch; he rubs her breast, and she grabs his crotch. There's also kissing, plus other sexual situations and sex-related talk. One scene shows an entire family drinking heavily and getting drunk; a young woman smokes cigarettes, and a staggeringly drunk man urinates in an alleyway. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (34)
• Kids say (82)

Based on 34 parent reviews

Dark comedy with violent ending for some characters.

What's the story.

In PARASITE, the Kim family -- father Ki-taek ( Song Kang-ho ), mother Chung-sook (Hyae Jin Chang), daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam), and son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) -- are all unemployed, folding pizza boxes in their dumpy, basement-level apartment to earn a little cash. Through a friend, Ki-woo gets the chance to tutor Park Da-hye (Jung Ziso), the daughter of a wealthy family, even though he's not a student. Turning on the charm, Ki-woo gets the job. Then, he and Ki-jung scheme to score a position for her, too, as an art therapist for the family's precocious youngest son. More plotting results in the firing of the family's driver and maid, providing jobs for Chung-sook and Ki-taek. Things seem to be looking up at last for the Kims -- until a bizarre secret turns everything totally sideways.

Is It Any Good?

South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho already has an impeccable track record, but he's stepped up his game with this brilliant, powerfully revealing social satire. Certainly Parasite might feel uneven to some audiences because of its radical shifts in tone -- from clever comedy to violent, dark tragedy -- but it's more likely that Bong has executed everything as planned. Each insignificant detail, from the young boy Da-song's love of Native Americans to a peach allergy to the Kim family's sad little half-basement apartment, has been planted for some specific, exacting reason.

Cleanly and slickly constructed, Parasite takes perverse pleasure in scamming the rich during its leisurely, funny first half, and that pleasure is contagious. When the second half comes, it's not only a narrative shock, but it also forces viewers to ask hard questions about why the first half was so enjoyable. In earlier films like The Host , Snowpiercer , and Okja , Bong slyly explored the impact that humans have had on our environment. In Parasite , he looks at an even bigger picture. He wonders why humans tend to look away from, or insulate themselves from, others' troubles and suffering. In this movie, reaching the high ground is certainly desirable, but those occupying the low ground aren't going anywhere.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Parasite 's violence . Is it shocking, or thrilling? How did it make you feel? How did the filmmakers achieve this effect? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

What does the movie have to say about class differences? How do the rich and poor view each other? How do they relate to one another?

How is sex depicted? What values are imparted?

How is drinking depicted? Is it glamorized? Are there consequences? Why does that matter?

Are any of the characters admirable? Can non-admirable characters still be interesting?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 11, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : January 14, 2020
• Cast : Kang-ho Song , Park So-dam , Choi Woo-sik
• Director : Joon-ho Bong
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Asian actors
• Studio : Neon
• Genre : Comedy
• Run time : 132 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language, some violence and sexual content
• Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA , Golden Globe
• Last updated : May 3, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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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 Movie Review : A captivating, sensational social satire

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Refrain from posting comments that are obscene, defamatory or inflammatory, and do not indulge in personal attacks, name calling or inciting hatred against any community. Help us delete comments that do not follow these guidelines by marking them offensive . Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.

Kaushik Biswas 5440 718 days ago

Wonderfully done film, outstanding story and a complete movie. A really nice and worth to watch.

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Vishal sethi 1055 days ago.

as movie started me and my friends were thinking this is not that good bit movie itself prove that why he won the Oscar the comedy drama thrilling everything is there . just watch it with patients

Yin Tun 1132 days ago

Subhrayu Mondal 1137 days ago

Psychological thriller. Mixture of both comedy and tragedy. Ending is quite confusing.

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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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‘Parasite’ Ending Explained: You Can’t Go Wrong With No Plans

Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho saves his most devastating twist for last.

The Big Picture

• Parasite explores greed and class divides, showcasing the clash between the wealthy Park family and the struggling Kim family.
• The film's shocking twist reveals a hidden man living in the Park family's basement, leading to chaos and bloodshed.
• Parasite offers a bleak and realistic ending, highlighting the idea of wealth as a prison and economic immobility as the new norm.

Bong Joon-ho ’s masterful Academy Award winner, Parasite , is a brutal satire about wealth disparity and the lengths we're willing to go to for family. One of only three movies to win both the Best Picture Oscar and the Palme d'Or , Parasite shifts from a biting dramedy to a suspenseful thriller in its second act, proving Joon-ho's affinity for humor, horror, and everything in between. Set in Seoul, South Korea, the movie follows the Kim family, who work low-income jobs and struggle to make ends meet. When son Ki-Woo ( Choi Woo-shik ) secures a gig tutoring the wealthy Park family's young daughter ( Jung Ji-so ), the Kims slowly begin to infiltrate the home, enjoying the unfamiliar luxuries afforded to the Parks. However, when the Parks' idyllic lifestyle proves to house a disturbing secret , chaos and bloodshed ensue, and we're left wondering who the parasites really are. So, how does Parasite end, and what does it mean?

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

What Is 'Parasite' About?

In Parasite , the Kim family's quest to overtake the Parks' home is no simple feat, and they do so by slyly getting the Parks to hire them without realizing that they're all related. Once Ki-woo gets his foot in the door by becoming Da-hye's tutor — with a certificate forged by his clever sister, Ki-jung ( Park So-dam ) — the pieces begin to fall strategically into place. Ki-woo uses his standing to introduce Ki-jung to the Parks, with her posing as a sought-after art therapist. Mr. and Mrs. Park ( Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong ) quickly hire Ki-jung to help their young son, Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun), who has recently been traumatized after seeing a "ghost" in their kitchen.

The Kim kids then frame the Parks’ driver for being a creep, which allows them to bring in their own father, Ki-taek ( Song Kang-ho ), for the job. Finally, the Parks let go of their longtime housekeeper, Moon-gwang ( Lee Jung-eun ), after Ki-jung exploits Moon-gwang's peach allergy to make it look like she has tuberculosis, paving the way for the Kims’ mother, Chung-sook ( Jang Hye-jin ), to get the gig. The Parks don’t learn that the Kims are related , and the Kims enjoy their time in the Park house, particularly when the wealthy family leaves for a trip.

Who Is the Man in the Basement in 'Parasite?'

Everything seems to be going fine until Moon-gwang returns to the house, claiming to have left something behind. In Parasite 's iconic, shocking twist , said "something" turns out to be Moon-gwang's husband, Geun-se (Park Myung-hoon), who, unbeknownst to the Parks, is living in a secret bunker in the basement , and is revealed to be the "ghost" that Da-Song saw one night when he was sneaking into the kitchen for food.

When the Kims threaten to expose and expel Geun-se, Moon-gwang in turn threatens to expose their familial status to the Parks, which she learns of after hearing them talk to one another. For a while, Moon-gwang and Geun-se get to live the high life until they are overpowered by the Kims, leading to an altercation that leaves Moon-gwang dead and Geun-se once again left in the basement. The Parks return early from their trip due to a storm, so the Kims are forced to leave and sleep in a gymnasium because their basement apartment has been flooded.

What Happens to the Family in 'Parasite'?

Parasite 's pulse-pounding climactic scene finds the Kims being invited to Da-song's birthday party at the Park house. Ki-woo sneaks into the basement to finish off Geun-se once and for all by bludgeoning him with a scholar's rock, but Geun-se, wanting to avenge his wife, escapes by violently cracking Ki-woo in the head instead. Continuing his rampage, a bloodied and terrifying Geun-se bursts out into the sunshine of the backyard birthday party, fatally stabbing Ki-jung and re-traumatizing Da-song before being killed by Ki-taek. When Ki-taek hears Mr. Park, talking about Geun-se's "poor man's smell" (a trait that Mrs. Park earlier commented on regarding Ki-taek), he kills him, too. As the party devolves into hysteria, Ki-taek flees the scene. Ki-woo wakes up sometime later in the hospital having sustained a severe head injury, with his sister dead, his father missing, and himself and his mother being convicted of fraud .

From 'Oldboy' to 'Parasite': 18 Essential Asian Movies Everyone Should Watch, According to Reddit

Sometime later, Ki-woo returns to look at the Park house, where another family has since moved in. He discovers a light flickering in Morse Code, deciphering the message and learning that his father is now living in the house's basement, having had to go into hiding after killing Mr. Park. We then see a sequence where Ki-woo makes enough money to buy the house and free his father. However, it's quickly revealed that the scenes of Ki-woo buying the house are just in his imagination . We’re brought back into reality by the closing shots of the film , not of Ki-woo in the house freeing his father as part of a victorious montage. Parasite ends with Ki-woo exactly where he started, back in his own basement and just as imprisoned as his father, but by economic circumstances rather than legal ones.

Why Is the Movie Called 'Parasite'?

Parasite 's double-ending is what makes it such a gut punch: it’s about a fantasy. We know that Ki-woo will never earn enough money to buy the house and free his father, because Parasite shows that economic mobility is dead. The Kims aren’t a “lazy” family who are simply avoiding hard work. They may be conniving and duplicitous, but they don’t expect others to do their jobs for them, which is more than can be said for the Parks. The Kims’ station in life is set, and it’s only through deceit that they can even come close to the wealth that the Parks possess. For their part, the movie asks if the Parks — wealthy idiots who are dependent on the lower class — are the real “parasites,” who give nothing back and don’t really care about anyone other than themselves. When the slums get flooded and people who have lost what little they had are sleeping in a gym, the Parks are more concerned about their son's birthday party than the well-being of the people they employ.

'Parasite's Bleak Ending Turns Wealth Into a Prison

The bleakness of Parasite 's ending comes from the fact that we know freeing Ki-taek is impossible. Granted, he could just turn himself in, but then he’d just be in another prison, or he’d get the death penalty, so he may as well stay in the basement. The prison of wealth is what entraps the Kims in the first place. Yes, they are “parasites” in a sense, since they feed off the wealthy Park family, but the lavishness of the Parks’ wealth was never going to come to the Kims. The idea of wealth becomes both a fantasy and a prison for the Kim family — something they’ll chase but never achieve. They’re stuck where they are: Ki-taek in a basement, and Ki-woo only able to look at the house from a distance.

These days, there’s a lot of talk about “income inequality”, which is an oddly hopeful phrase, because it implies that we can just rebalance the scales somehow through economic programs and government intervention. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is far more pessimistic, arguing that economic immobility is the new normal , and that those who are born poor will die poor and those who are rich will die rich. The fantasy of upward economic mobility is Ki-woo’s fantasy. If it was as simple as just getting rich and buying that house, why would he have been living in a slum in the first place? It’s a nice thought that he could become rich and buy the house to free his father, and they’d all live happily ever after, but that’s never going to happen. We’re all trapped where we are.

Parasite is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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