PARASITE: 2020 Awards Season Preview

One of the best reviewed and most talked about films of the year, Bong Joon Ho’s (Okja, Snowpiercer) exhilarating art-house blockbuster follows a threadbare family of four struggling to make ends meet gradually hatches a scheme to work for, and as a result infiltrate, the wealthy household of an entrepreneur, his seemingly frivolous wife, and their troubled kids. How they go about doing this—and how their best-laid plans spiral out to destruction and madness—constitutes one of the wildest, scariest, and most unexpectedly affecting movies in years, a portrayal of contemporary class resentment that deservedly won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or.

Described by Bong himself as “a comedy without clowns and a tragedy without villains,” the film moves quickly from one tone to another, mixing pathos and satire with thrills and drama, in a perfectly controlled blend of many different genres. A vertical story of class struggle — punctuated by staircase scenes going from moldy basements to top floors, from darkness to breezy spaces designed by star architects —Parasite is both riveting and rigorous in its depiction of the extremes to which human beings push themselves in a world of unending, unbridgeable economic inequality.

*Golden Globe-nominated for Best Director, Screenplay and Foreign Language Film.