Parasite

Parasite (Korean: 기생충; Hanja: 寄生蟲; RR: Gisaengchung) is a 2019 South Korean black comedy thriller film directed by Bong Joon-ho, who co-wrote the screenplay with Han Jin-won. The film, starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Jang Hye-jin, and Lee Jung-eun, follows a poor family who scheme to become employed by a wealthy family and infiltrate their household by posing as unrelated, highly qualified individuals.

Parasite premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2019, where it became the first South Korean film to win the Palme d'Or. It was then released in South Korea by CJ Entertainment on 30 May 2019. The film is considered by many critics to be the best film of 2019 and one of the greatest films of the 21st century. It grossed over $263 million worldwide on a $15.5 million budget. Among its numerous accolades, Parasite won a leading four awards at the 92nd Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film, becoming the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Parasite is the first South Korean film to receive Academy Award recognition, along with being one of three films to win both the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first such achievement in over 60 years. It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language, and became the first non-English language film to win the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. A television series, set around the events of the film, is in early development.

Plot
The Kims - mother and father Chung-sook and Ki-taek, and their young adult offspring, son Ki-woo and daughter Ki-jung - are a poor family living in a shabby and cramped half basement apartment in a busy lower working class commercial district of Seoul. Without even knowing it, they, especially Mr. and Mrs. Kim, literally smell of poverty. Often as a collective, they perpetrate minor scams to get by, and even when they have jobs, they do the minimum work required. Ki-woo is the one who has dreams of getting out of poverty by one day going to university. Despite not having that university education, Ki-woo is chosen by his university student friend Min, who is leaving to go to school, to take over his tutoring job to Park Da-hye, who Min plans to date once he returns to Seoul and she herself is in university. The Parks are a wealthy family who for four years have lived in their modernistic house designed by and the former residence of famed architect Namgoong. While Mr. and Mrs. Park are all about status, Mrs. Park has a flighty, simpleminded mentality and temperament, which Min tells Ki-woo to feel comfortable in lying to her about his education to get the job. In getting the job, Ki-woo further learns that Mrs. Park is looking for an art therapist for the Parks' adolescent son, Da-song, Ki-woo quickly recommending his professional art therapist friend "Jessica", really Ki-jung who he knows can pull off the scam in being the easiest liar of the four Kims. In Ki-woo also falling for Da-hye, he begins to envision himself in that house, and thus the Kims as a collective start a plan for all the Kims, like Ki-jung using assumed names, to replace existing servants in the Parks' employ in orchestrating reasons for them to be fired. The most difficult to get rid of may be Moon-gwang, the Parks' housekeeper who literally came with the house - she Namgoong's housekeeper when he lived there - and thus knows all the little nooks and crannies of it better than the Parks themselves. The question then becomes how far the Kims can take this scam in their quest to become their version of the Parks.

Why It's a Parasite

 * 1) It's an extremely entertaining thriller that perfectly blends comedy and thrills, similar to Knives Out, another black comedy film released in 2019.
 * 2) It tells an entertaining story but without sacrificing the believability of its narrative.
 * 3) The acting is especially brilliant, especially from Song Kang-ho, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, and Park So-dam, with the latter easily being the best part of the film.
 * 4) This is considered one of Bong Joon-ho's best films along with Snowpiercer and Memories of a Murder. His direction is extremely impressive too and won a deserved Oscar for it.
 * 5) Like other films by Bong Joon-ho, it looks into timely social themes in South Korea.
 * 6) Any genre you name, this movie covers it. Thriller, Mystery, Comedy, Horror, Drama, Romance, Tragedy, you name it. It perfectly throws them into the blender to make a delicious mix.
 * 7) The humor is hilarious.
 * 8) A bunch of brilliant twists throughout all of the acts.
 * 9) The film makes several nods to Alfred Hitchcock throughout. Stairs are used as a motif, voyeurism is used as characters watch scenes through windows 14 times, and (most obviously) there is a brief glimpse of an out of place Alfred Hitchcock collection in the Park's home.
 * 10) * The Park family's home is also sort of inspired by Psycho.
 * 11) The film manages to respect its audience by trusting them to notice important details and acknowledge them without shoving them down their throats.
 * 12) It's perfectly fast-paced. It's not too quick or too slow. It allows the viewers to be able to see everything go on without it flashing before their eyes, meaning they won't forget about it later on.
 * 13) Because it's super entertaining, there are absolutely no boring scenes in the movie to be seen.
 * 14) The cinematography is gorgeous and breathtaking. Because of where the camera's standing, it allows everything to look gorgeous on screen.
 * 15) The score and sound design by Jeong Jae-il are almost perfect in every scenario, especially "The Belt of Faith."
 * 16) The ending is extremely sad; with Ki-woo's family ending up worse than in the beginning and him writing a letter to his father promising to earn enough money to one day buy the house and set him free but finally realizing that this is an impossible goal.
 * 17) It teaches us that not everything in life can be planned.

The Only Bad Quality

 * 1) For a satire, it relies on too much bark and not enough bite. The movie could've presented a conclusion to the problems with class welfare.

Reception
Parasite received universal acclaim from critics and audiences alike, and is widely considered to be one of the greatest South Korean films ever made and one of the best films of the 2010s decade. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 98% based on 304 reviews, with an average rating of 9.41/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "An urgent, brilliantly layered look at timely social themes, Parasite finds writer-director Bong Joon Ho in near-total command of his craft." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 96 out of 100 based on 48 critics, indicating "universal acclaim." It's also the highest-rated film on Letterboxd, having a 4.6/5 as of February 2020 and overtaking The Godfather's record.

Awards and Nominations
The film won the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first South Korean film to win such an award. At the 77th Golden Globe Awards, the film was nominated for three awards, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, and won Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first-ever Korean film to achieve that feat. It also won a Critics Choice Award for "Best Director" (Tied with 1917 director Sam Mendes)

It also won Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature film, and Best Original Screenplay at the 92nd Academy Awards. Parasite is the first film not in English to win Best Picture, the first South Korean film to be nominated, and the second film produced by an Asian country to be nominated since 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Trivia

 * The Park's house, said in the film to be designed by a fictional architect named Namgoong Hyeonja, was a set completely built from scratch.
 * The house was designed to feature lines that divide the Parks and Kims.
 * This was the first foreign film to win an academy award for the best picture.
 * An HBO limited series based on the film is in the works, with Bong Joon-ho and Adam McKay serving as executive producers.
 * It popularized the food Ram-don, a steak ramen.

Videos
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