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. Park (Lee Sun-kyun) and his glamorously vacant wife Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong). 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. Without bad luck, they would have no luck at all.īut fortune favors the bold, especially when the bold are armed with flexible ethics and sharp forgery skills.
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. 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. distribution rights at AFM last year.įrom the opening scene, Bong sets up a stark visual contrast between the unequal social castes at play here. After Cannes it should also enjoy a healthy festival run, starting with Sydney on June 15. It opens May 30 in South Korea, where Bong has a consistently strong commercial track record, with more territories to follow in June. 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. The largely naturalistic treatment here may also alienate some of his fantasy fanboy constituency. Like much of Bong’s work, Parasite is cumbersomely plotted and heavy-handed in its social commentary. Bong calls the film “a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains.” Whatever the horror-movie connotations of that double-edged title, the morally flawed monsters in Parasite are entirely human. 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. 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. 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.