Parasite | Picturehouse

Sam Clements is joined by cinema programmers Carol McKay and Codie Entwistle to discuss the results of the BAFTAs and Bong Joon-Ho's new film, Parasite. In cinemas now.

A glorious success and box-office hit for Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, Okja) and already the most successful Palme d'Or winner ever, Parasite is a politically charged cinematic wonder. 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. A vertical story of class struggle – punctuated by staircase scenes going from mouldy basements to top floors, from darkness to breezy spaces designed by star architects – Parasite observes and dissects with surgical precision the life of two families of different social backgrounds.

Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) is a good-for-nothing, unemployed family man, patriarch of a family of grifters – his wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin), his clever twenty-something daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam), and his son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) – who live in an overcrowded, sordid basement. The Parks, on the other hand, live in a fabulous house with their teenage daughter Da-hye and terribly spoiled son Da-song, who has suffered a childhood trauma that occasionally causes him seizures and strange behaviour. When, due to an unexpected stroke of luck, Ki-woo is hired by the Parks to be the private English tutor of Da-hye, the destinies of the two families cross. Their explosive meeting exposes the merciless evils of class inequalities, culminating in a powerful and utterly original outcome.