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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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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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‘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 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.

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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 review: An intricate examination of class conflict

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Dir: Bong Joon-ho. Starring: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam. 15 cert, 132 mins

The world can seem a very different place depending on the window you’re looking out of. Out of their stinkbug and mildew-infested basement apartment, the Kim family sees steel bars. Beyond that, one of Seoul’s backstreets – the kind that drunks dive into to relieve themselves. When the street fumigators go by, they leave their windows open so their apartment can be treated for free, even if they nearly choke to death in the process. Then there’s the Park family, settled in a quiet suburban home that’s halfway between an art installation and a fortress. Half the walls are made of glass, offering a clear view of the acid-green lawn outside and the vegetation that encloses it on all sides. It’s a vista of immense serenity, safety, and eerie perfection.

The Park patriarch Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) is a tech CEO who’s barely home, while his wife Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) is fluttery and fragile. She obsesses over the imagined artistic genius of her son. He specialises in angry, rebellious scribbles. Toy dogs keep appearing out of nowhere. Are they multiplying in secret?

It’s into this shiny, hollow world that the Kim family try to integrate themselves, after the son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is hired as an English-language tutor. He immediately hatches a plan to get the rest of the clan – which comprises his parents, Ki-taek (veteran actor Song Kang-ho) and Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin), as well as his sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) – employed. Their schemes are exhilarating, as clever and intricately plotted as they are mildly preposterous. For much of Bong Joon-ho ’s Parasite , which the director co-wrote with Han Jin-won, the audience is swept up in the heady thrill of the con. We see them forge documents, invent aliases, and carefully rehearse their lines.

• Parasite’s Song Kang-ho: ‘It’s easier to be generous when you’re rich’

But Bong has never made a straightforward film in his life – that’s why he’s one of the great masters of the cinematic game (his awards recognition is long overdue, with Parasite landing six Oscar nominations). The director’s work is as playful as it is sincere and revelatory. He’ll make you feel at home, and then rip the rug out from under you. As his takes on the monster movie (2006’s The Host ) and dystopian fantasy (2013’s Snowpiercer ) already proved, the director has an affinity for genre cinema, but has never felt confined by its rules. Parasite doesn’t quite take place in our world, but neither is it fantasy. It happens in a world that would exist if people’s desires and motivations weren’t stuffed below the surface.

The director’s always shown an interest in class conflict. The train in Snowpiercer is just one big metaphor for capitalism, after all. But Parasite might be his most intricate examination of the topic so far. The “parasite” of the title applies to every character in this film; the rich leech off the poor, who in turn survive by attaching themselves to the underbelly of the ruling class.

Oscars 2020 Best Picture contenders

Everyone’s fixated on transforming into something else: the Kim family give themselves new backstories that involve fancy foreign colleges and elite skill sets. Yeon-gyo is obsessed with American culture (the most capitalist of them all), importing Native American-style toys for her son and declaring he’s the next Basquiat. In Parasite , capitalism is an illusion piled onto another illusion, with everyone trampling each other to reach some undefined goal.

Much of this story, however, isn’t told in words, but in the use of space and the way people move through it. The Kim family are often bundled into the same frame, perched awkwardly on furniture and fittings so they can all fit. They’re a united front in this battle. The Park family, meanwhile, always sit in separate rooms or sides of the frame. No wonder they’re so weak and easily manipulated.

But, be warned: there are no victories in Parasite . And no one gets away scot-free.

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Korean export Parasite may be the class-conscious thriller of the year

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

Maybe you can’t actually eat the rich. But you can steal their lunch, and their life: That’s the essential premise of Bong Joon-ho ’s Parasite , a serrating, brilliantly stylized portrait of class and fate and family in modern-day Korea.

The Kims — Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song), his wife Chung-sook (Hye-jin Jang), their son Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi), and daughter Ki-jung (So-dam Park) — live dead-broke but cheerful in a dingy basement apartment in Seoul, scuttling up into ceiling corners to tap free Wi-Fi and pre-assembling pizza boxes for spare change.

Ki-woo doesn’t seem to be in any huge rush toward gainful employment, but he catches a lucky break when an old friend hands down his job as an English tutor for a teenage girl from a wealthy family. No actual tutoring experience, or even a college degree? That’s easy enough for Ki-jung to fix with a little creative Photoshop. And the Parks, or at least their fussy, fluttery young matriarch, Yeon-keo (Yeo-jeong Jo), are a very credulous people.

First they welcome Ki-woo into their gorgeous box-modern home; then, when Yeon-keo mentions that her youngest could use another art instructor, the new tutor is happy to share his casual, completely unbiased advice: There’s a girl he’s heard great things about — just a distant acquaintance who goes by Jessica and happens, unbeknown to the Parks, to share his home and approximately 50 percent of his DNA.

It’s not long before the entire family has infiltrated the Park household and stealthily filled every corner of their personal service economy: cooking, driving, caring for their children. But what Bong ( Snowpiercer , The Host ) chooses to do once he’s laid down the narrative kindling isn’t pour on gasoline. Instead he tends to his little fires carefully, revealing the full messy humanity of his characters bit by bit — all the half-buried flaws, quirks, and aspirations that live somewhere between the obvious signposts of good guys (poor) and bad (rich).

What the story doesn’t seem particularly interested in, for all its class consciousness and social currency — and the glut of prestige festival prizes , including the Palme d’Or , already on the mantel — is drawing any clean, easy lines between outer wealth and inner worth. Bong has more than enough to say about the disconnect between money and meritocracy, the vagaries of family, and the things people do when the social contract is suddenly stripped away. But he does it with so much wit and heart that it almost feels like a party trick: swirling big-swing provocations into the creamy peanut butter of crowd-pleasing entertainment.

That’s what makes its final moments so unsettling, and so unforgettable. If the movie is a Rorschach of who you identify as parasite and host, it’s a test you’re just as likely to fail; a filmgoing experience that refuses to fit into any box, and forces viewers to breathe the dangerous air outside of it too. A–

( Parasite premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and will be in select theaters beginning Oct. 11.)

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• The ferocious, chilling Parasite is an essential thrill ride about social inequality

Snowpiercer and The Host director Bong Joon-ho reaches the peak of his game with a new must-see horror masterpiece.

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The upstairs-downstairs construct — in which the literal levels of a house demarcate the differences between the wealthy and those who serve them — has long worked as shorthand for class division and struggle. (See: every British period drama, ever.) The “upstairs” people are comfortable, happy, and prefer to be oblivious to what’s going on “downstairs” with the hired help, who do their work and live their lives invisibly alongside.

In Parasite , Korean horror master Bong Joon-Ho ( The Host , Snowpiercer ) draws on that visual metaphor for a twisty, pummeling thriller that’s among his best work. It’s thematically familiar territory for Bong; his films always pair heart-stopping and imaginative terror with humor and a healthy dose of raging at inequality. Parasite feels in many ways like the culmination.

That’s partly because Bong is working at the top of his game, constructing with his cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo a world where drastic shifts occur between the insides of houses that don’t just signify changing living conditions but the interior state of the inhabitants. Everything on these characters’ insides shows up outside, too — and that may be why their world is in chaos.

Parasite is a tale of two families in a symbiotic relationship

It’s not wise to say too much about the plot of Parasite , because its jarring left turns are what make it so pointedly critical of the vast inequalities in its world and, perhaps more importantly, the inability of the haves to recognize how their lives affect the have-nots.

But it starts out like a satirical story of grifters — specifically, the Kim family, who aren’t poverty-stricken yet but are definitely headed that way. The four of them, two parents and two university-aged children who can’t possibly afford university, live in a dingy apartment that’s half below-ground. They have to peer out their high windows to see what’s happening on the sidewalk directly outside. The Kims scrape to make ends meet, folding pizza boxes to earn a little cash and running around the apartment chasing wifi signals from the coffeeshop next door. When the fumigator comes by to spray the streets, they open their windows, hoping to kill some of the vermin that live in there with them.

One day, son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) is given a great opportunity: His friend is leaving a job tutoring a wealthy teenaged girl in English and would like to recommend Ki-woo in his place. Ki-woo agrees, introduces himself to the Park family as “Kevin,” and starts tutoring Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), who promptly falls in love with him.

Through some fortuitous events and also some mild-to-moderate lying, Ki-woo soon succeeds in getting the Parks to hire the rest of his family members, too — his sister (Park So-dam) as an art tutor to Da-hye’s younger brother, his father (Song Kang-ho) as chauffeur to the wealthy entrepreneur father, and his mother (Jang Hye-jin) as housekeeper — all without the Parks quite realizing they’ve hired an entire family. Everyone seems happy. Everything is good in the world.

Until it all goes very, very sideways.

Parasite is an unpredictable, thought-provoking masterpiece about inequality

Bong’s films are always hilarious and farcical, almost slapstick and then violent. There are no real heroes but few true villains; people do ignoble things to one another but you kind of get the reason why. Everyone in a Bong Joon-ho film is, at least to some degree, the victim of his or her circumstances. They’re cogs in a much, much larger machine — or to put it another way, just creatures living in an ecosystem they cannot possibly control.

Parasite feels like the movie the director has been training to make throughout his entire career. It’s a movie about the ugly, brutal hilarity of modern life, where some people get to live out in the open and others are forced into the shadows, but everyone’s sucking one another’s life blood. The fun in unraveling Parasite is figuring out just who the title is about and why they’re the parasite here. (It seems not entirely coincidental that one of Bong’s earlier breakout hits was the fabulous 2006 monster movie The Host .)

The movie serves up a rich stew of caustic wit and catastrophe, and watching the spaces the characters move through is a key to making it all work, from the dingy dirt of the Kims’ half-basement home to the Parks’ spacious and airy house, built as a work of art by a famous architect. The contrast is a stark reminder to the Kims of what they could have and how they assume it would make them feel if they did.

And yet Bong and co-writer Han Jin-won don’t fall into stereotypes of haves and have-nots , either. This is not a movie about how rich people are actually miserable. Whether it’s because of their surroundings or just a coincidence, the Parks seem to live an untroubled and happy existence; their crime is in being so comfortable that they can’t really imagine anyone is struggling. And the Kims are not made saints by their poverty, either.

Combine those characters with an unpredictable plot and Parasite emerges as a masterpiece. It’s also an exemplary specimen of a kind of movie that’s proliferated this year — movies like Knives Out and Ready or Not and Joker and many, many others , each about the mounting gap between the rich and the rest of the world. It’s been a marked trend, and Parasite is one of the finest, probably because Bong knows his way around a visual metaphor (and as the movie goes on, it’s a lot more than just the houses). No wonder the movie won the Palme d’or at Cannes in May .

And while it’s hugely entertaining, Parasite is also thought-provoking. By the time the catharsis arrives, you think you’re at the end of the film, but a coda adds a new wrinkle to the whole thing. If a parasite eventually takes over its host, then what will happen to a world where everyone, in some way, is a parasite for someone else?

Parasite premiered at Cannes in May and played at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, among others. It opens in theaters on October 11.

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Parasite Reviews

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

My respect for Bong Joon-Ho is up in the sky, because he and everyone else involved in this movie pretty much knocked it out of the park on multiple fronts.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 4, 2021

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What It Means That 'Parasite' Won The Oscar For Best Picture

Justin Chang

Last night, Parasite became the first ever non-English language film to win best picture at the Academy Awards. Film critic Justin Chang tells NPR's Audie Cornish what makes it great.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Last night at the Academy Awards, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho won fistfuls of Academy Awards for his movie "Parasite."

(SOUNDBITE OF 92ND ACADEMY AWARDS TELECAST)

BONG JOON-HO: (Through interpreter) After winning best international feature, I thought I was done for the day and was ready to relax.

JUSTIN CHANG: I got to talk to director Bong last night. I think he was just incredibly surprised. The thing he just kept saying is this is crazy, this is crazy. (Laughter) I think he still could not believe it.

CORNISH: That's Justin Chang, film critic for the LA Times. We called him up to talk about "Parasite's" big night at the Oscars. And we started out with a quick fact check. Sure, director Bong was surprised his Korean language film did so well, as were most of us. But "Parasite" did well at the box office. He's a highly esteemed director. So was "Parasite" really such an underdog for best picture?

CHANG: Commercially, there was no - there was nothing holding it back. Critically, it was a huge success.

AUDIE CORNISH AND JUSTIN CHANG: And yet...

CHANG: ...Because of that language barrier, Audie, it's you know, 92 years where you've had non-English language films by Fellini and Bergman and Ozu and Kurosawa were all the rage when in some ways, you know, international cinema had even more of a foothold perhaps culturally. Never did one of those movies get close to actually winning best picture. I mean, you had things like Bergman's "Cries And Whispers," Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion," which competed in 1938 - was up for best picture. It didn't win. And so it's - I think "Parasite" is the 12th non-English language movie, I believe, to be nominated for best picture. And it finally won. And it's really staggering because up until this year's Oscars, South Korea, I don't think, had ever been nominated for an Oscar in any category.

CORNISH: Can we talk about why that's a surprise? I mean mainly because they have a robust film industry.

CHANG: They have a very robust industry. And I think Korean cinema is just some of the most exciting in the world today. I see movies like, you know, "The Handmaiden" by Park Chan-wook, which was not even nominated a few years ago for, then, foreign language film; Lee Chang-dong with films like "Burning" and director Bong, who is, you know, probably the most commercially successful and internationally recognizable of these directors. And he also makes movies in a style that is really accessible, as we've seen with "Parasite," to viewers all over the world.

CORNISH: There are Americans who would be familiar with Bong Joon-ho - right? - because he was a director of "Mother" and "The Host" and "Snowpiercer" - right? - so films that did make it to American audiences. But how does he reflect the Korean film industry - Maybe the tone and style of films that have dominated there? And what does it mean for it to break through with something like the Oscars?

CHANG: Yeah. What's great and singular about director Bong is that he is a great ambassador for Korean cinema because in part - you know, he did the Hollywood thing, too, you know - and pretty well - better than most. He made "Snowpiercer" and "Okja" both with major Hollywood movie stars and predominantly shot in the English language. I think there's something really, really moving and really fitting about the fact that it was after he did that and he went back to Korean filmmaking - went back to his roots, per se, and made this very intimately scaled, modestly budgeted Korean movie - that this is where - it almost feels like this is where he found his purest voice. And it's really, I think, telling that this is the movie that has become his international sensation.

I think that there is something to be said for telling a story where you have complete control over something. And the story is very intimate in scale, but you have complete authority over the story that you're telling.

CORNISH: I feel like he quoted Scorsese about this - the idea of making something personal.

CHANG: The most personal is most creative is what he said. And he attributed that quote to Scorsese. He said that that came to him spontaneously. He didn't know what he was going to say. He locked eyes with Scorsese from the stage. He didn't even know where the other directors were sitting because when you're in the Dolby Theater, you don't know where your fellow nominees are. And they just happened to make eye contact, and that quote came to mind.

CORNISH: Justin Chang, film critic for the LA Times.

Thanks so much.

CHANG: Thank you, Audie.

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Comedy , Drama , Mystery/Suspense

Content Caution

In Theaters

• November 8, 2019
• Song Kang-ho as Kim Ki-taek; Choi Woo-shik as Kim Ki-woo (Kevin); Park So-dam as Kim Ki-jeong (Jessie); Chang Hyae-jin as Kim Chung-sook; Lee Sun-kyun as Park Dong-ik; Cho Yeo-jeong as Park Yeon-gyo; Lee Jung-eun as Gook Moon-gwang; Park Myung-hoon as Geun-sae; Park Da-hye; Jung Hyeon-jun as Park Da-song

Home Release Date

• January 28, 2020
• Bong Joon Ho

Distributor

Movie review.

It started with a rock.

A special rock. A lucky rock. A so-called “scholar’s rock,” valued for its rugged, regal shape. It was a gift to Kim Ki-woo, a university-age (though not university-bound) guy who doesn’t have much use for a rock, but sure could use a little luck. He and his family live in a scrubby semi-basement in South Korea, four members of the country’s countless working poor.

Not that the Kims work, exactly. Not now. Not since Papa Kim’s businesses all went belly-up and jobs have been so hard to find. The four have been folding pizza boxes to make a little cash. And when the bug fumigators saunter by, Papa Kim insists on keeping the window open, to cut down on the semi-basement’s stinkbug population.

Kim Ki-woo’s friend, who gives him the rock, says the chunk of stone is supposed to shower wealth on whoever possesses it.

“This is so metaphorical,” Ki-Woo says. But then again, he says that about a lot of things.

Still, there may be something to that stony metaphor: When the friend brings the rock, he also brings a lead on a job. He’s been serving as an English tutor for Park Da-hye, the daughter of a powerful—and rich—CEO. It’s been a good gig, but the friend is leaving to study overseas. And he doesn’t want to turn Da-hye (whom he’s sweet on) over to some slavering college guy—even though being in college is, technically, a prerequisite for the job. Would Ki-Woo like to apply? He knows English, after all. All he needs is a forged paper or two. And Ki-woo’s sister, who has a great eye for art and subterfuge, can handle that .

Ki-woo agrees and has his talented sis (whom, her proud papa says, should really get a major from Oxford in forgery) whip up the necessary papers. Ki-woo doesn’t feel guilty at all. After all, he’s bound to get into university next year. “I just printed out the document a bit early.”

The interview goes quite well. And Ki-woo finds Da-hye, a sophomore in high school, quite cute. Da-hye’s mother gives him his first wad of money, dubs him with the English name Kevin and mentions that their young boy, Da-song, could sure use another art tutor. The kid’s been through plenty, but none stay longer than a month or so.

Kevin stews on that bit of information for, oh, about five seconds, when an idea pops into his head.

“Someone just came to mind,” he tells Mrs. Park. A friend of a cousin, he thinks. She’s studied in the United States—at prestigious Illinois State University, in fact. But she might be back in the country. But, Kevin thinks, his sister just might pull it off with this fabulously wealthy, incredibly naïve mom. Why, if they play their cards right, maybe the whole Kim family could wind up working for the Parks. And who knows what might happen after that?

Yep, that rock may be special after all.

Positive Elements

Many of the main players in Parasite are strangely sympathetic but deeply flawed. You’ll not find a real role model here. Still, it’s pretty obvious that the wealthy Parks and the hardscrabble Kims both love their families—though the ways love presents itself can be quite different.

Spiritual Elements

We hear a bit about the “lucky” rock. We also hear a passing reference to a local church (the “Love of God” church) that placed an important pizza order. Someone believes he sees a ghost.

Sexual Content

Mr. and Mrs. Park have sex on a couch. Frontal nudity is barely avoided in this explicit scene, but it’s very clear what’s going on. The couple moans and enters into pretty frank dialogue.

College-age Kevin and high-schooler Da-hye carry on a relationship. We see the romantic tension during their first lesson (when Kevin takes her wrist to feel her racing pulse). Later, during a tutoring session, they kiss. They share a lengthy smooch somewhat later, and Kevin says that he hopes to ask her to officially date him once she enters college. Kevin’s family jokes that they could soon be Da-hye’s in-laws. Da-hye gets jealous and possessive.

Someone removes a pair of panties to frame a chauffeur. We hear a great deal of conversation surrounding those panties, including some obscene comments.

Papa Kim squeezes his wife’s backside. A woman gives her husband a backrub. A man asks Mr. Park whether he loves his wife on a couple of occasions, and that same man gently touches Mrs. Park’s hand.

Violent Content

[ Spoiler Warning ] Several people are stabbed. Some of them die, and we see a great deal of blood. Someone is kicked down a flight of stairs and gets knocked unconscious. People are tied up and gagged. A person smashes another person’s head with a rock. A man pounds his head against something until it’s bleeding heavily. Someone is deathly allergic to peaches (a fact that’s exploited, much to the allergic person’s deep consternation). Someone else is prone to having epileptic-like seizures and fainting spells.

Crude or Profane Language

We har nearly 25 f-words, three s-words and a smattering of other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused four times, once with the word “d–n,” while Jesus’ name is abused once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The Kims get drunk on whiskey one evening, breaking glasses and bottles as the night wears on. They also drink beer together as a family. Kevin (then still known as Ki-woo) does some shots with his friend. While having sex, Mrs. Park begs for Mr. Park to buy her drugs.

Kevin’s sister smokes. We hear references to meth and cocaine.

Other Negative Elements

A huge rainstorm proves to be a minor inconvenience for the Parks, who live high on a hill. To the poor citizens of this South Korean city, though, it’s devastating. Many people who live in basement and semi-basement apartments are completely flooded out, and much of the flood water (we learn) is sewage. Some dark brown water spurts and shoots from a toilet; sometimes the lid is open, sometimes closed, but it’s seriously messy and gross.

The Parks often comment on how their servants smell. They’re appalled by the stench of poverty, apparently, particularly Mr. Park, who says that his chauffeur smells like a cooked turnip. The Parks’ revulsion at that smell, along with the insecurity that precipitates from it, runs throughout the movie.

People frequently urinate in front of the Kims’ home. At one point, Kevin tries to stop the man from doing so, and that leads to a weird liquid fight involving both water and urine.

The Kims—all of them—lie in order to further their station. They desperately try to hop on other people’s WiFi network. Da-song, the Park’s young boy, is supposed to have some indeterminate mental challenges. His sister thinks he’s lying.

Parasite has been the surprise of the 2019 cinematic awards season. This low-budget, South Korean mystery/thriller/comedy/tragedy has been scooping up all sorts of honors. In advance of the Academy Awards, it seems poised not just to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but potentially to be nominated in the Best Picture category as well.

And it is, certainly, a clever film, filled with sting-like schemes, moments of humor, cogent cultural satire and a couple of surprises.

It also contains a lot of really troubling behavior.

That is, of course, cooked into the story. You’re not necessarily supposed to like a lot of the people we meet—so the fact that we like so many of them in spite of themselves is a tribute to filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. The rich can treat the poor like non-humans. The poor can treat the rich with their own kind of contempt. Whatever warmth and hope we find here is buried under seriously troubling behavior. The film’s sex, violence and language would be enough to earn Parasite its R-rating, certainly. But even if it was as clean enough to slap on Disney+, the characters themselves, and their often self-destructive attitudes, would be enough to give many pause.

I understand Parasite’ s appeal. But sometimes the film, like the truly “metaphorical” stink bugs that we see early on, can crawl in the corners and smell something awful.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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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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Parasite - Official Trailer

Bong Joon Ho

Sin-Ae Kwak

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Kaushik Biswas 7626 708 days ago

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

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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

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Subhrayu Mondal 1127 days ago

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

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Parasite Review

07 Feb 2020

Parasite is a difficult film to talk about. It defies any easy pigeonhole, wriggles free from slotting into a single genre, can be considered both a mainstream crowd-pleaser and an arthouse masterpiece — and is, undeniably, a film best enjoyed going in blind, its delicious and shocking surprises ideally experienced as innocently and obliviously as possible. So, finding words to describe it are hard. If there’s one word that can best sum it up, it’s the director: Bong Joon Ho .

Parasite is pure Bong, which is to say that it is many things at once. From his 2000 debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite , onwards, the Korean auteur has had an itchy, restless mind, never settling on tone or subject matter, darting from horror to thriller to dystopian sci-fi to vegan monster movie — sometimes within the same film — sucking up influences from both Hollywood (Spielberg, Hitchcock) and his native Korea (Kim Ki-young, Lee Chang-dong) along the way. His hallmark is his multitudes.

This, his seventh film, is different again; after the futuristic stylings of Okja and Snowpiercer , Parasite initially snaps into something resembling contemporary social realism. We meet the impoverished Kim family — parents Ki-taek ( Song Kang-ho ) and Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin), and their adult children Ki-jung (So-dam Park) and Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) — living in a squalid semi-basement apartment. They are unemployed and apparently unemployable. They steal whatever free Wi-Fi their cheap phones can pick up, leave their windows open so the street fumigators will also kill their stink- bug infestation, and watch helplessly as local drunks piss on the road above them.

They’ve seen better days. Life is hard. But this is no Ken Loach tragedy. The Kims, we soon learn, are quixotically ambitious and almost Machiavellian in their ingenuity. When an opportunity presents itself for Ki-woo, the son, to engage in some light subterfuge by posing as an English-language teacher for the teenage daughter of the wealthy Park family, they seize it. There seems to be no question among them: the Kims are a united front from the start, and will embark in whatever professional bullshittery they need to lift themselves up.

The Parks, on the other hand, are in every sense the economic and social opposites of the Kims. They live in a grand, modernist mansion in a hilly Seoul suburb; the aloof Park patriarch, Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun), is head of some faceless IT company, while his stay-at-home wife Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) frets about their troubled children alongside a permanent housekeeper (Lee Jung-eun). Their deeply detached privilege ensures that the Kim family, one-by-one, manage to swindle their way into the family home, without it ever seeming implausible.

Manages to scratch every cinematic itch you have and offers more up you didn’t know you had.

And so the first hour of the film plays out like a conman caper, with all the pace and fizz of an Ocean’s Eleven . There is a wicked joy to be had in watching the Kims’ ingenious scheme unfurl, piece by piece: a carefully placed pair of knickers here, a scraping of peach skin there. The script, written by Bong and Han Jin-won, has the thick, suspenseful plotting of the best thrillers: sometimes stressful, sometimes darkly funny, always artfully constructed, telegraphs and callbacks everywhere.

If anything, the Kims’ plan goes too well, because we soon realise something has to go wrong. Where will the conflict come from? Surely their elaborate gambit will be foiled? Bong’s masterstroke is to take that tension and use it against us, to subvert our expectations wildly, to present unexpected challenges to his characters and veer into different genres and tones, to turn the film into something different entirely. Something that makes it, again, difficult to talk about without veering into spoilers.

What we can talk about is the astonishing craft on display here. This is a filmmaker who knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. His camera moves and glides with total assurance and conviction, every pan and dolly deliberate. It is, among many achievements, a remarkably well-edited film, the rhythms and pace guiding us through his chosen themes with such care that there is no mystery of its intention.

It is, fundamentally, a film about the haves and have-nots. Sometimes the commentary is worn on its sleeve: one character repeatedly notes how “metaphorical” things are, perhaps 
a self-mocking nod to the director himself, who floods his films with meaning. Even that title is hugely instructive: the Kims, it’s clear, are as parasitic as the stink bugs that infest their squalid home, leeching off the wealth of others — but so, too, are the Parks, a family rendered infantile and helpless by their fortune, unable to complete basic tasks without enlisting working-class servants to refine their lives.

Baked into this theme of inequality is the ambiguity of it all. There are no villains here. The rich Park family are obnoxious, but ultimately nice — though, as the Kim matriarch notes with 
a poisonous tone, “They’re nice because they’re rich.” The poor Kim family are liars, scoundrels, and criminals, if you wanted to get technical about it — yet they’re essentially only conning their way into menial working-class jobs. It’s not exactly the kind of take Danny Ocean would go for. They’re just doing what they can to survive. If there’s a villain here, it’s capitalism, and the structures that force people into indignity, desperation and naked self-interest. With a typical tonal rollercoaster, Bong gives the film an extraordinary bittersweet ending, offering sun-dappled hope as quickly as it offers a tangy note of downbeat, realist cynicism, and one that forces us to confront where we sit in the upstairs-downstairs riddle.

But talk of capitalist allegories and social commentary should not detract from just how insanely entertaining this film is. It is hard not to watch it rapt and gobsmacked, your jaw permanently near the floor. The script was written for the theatre but the experience feels like it should only be had in a packed cinema, where the crowd reactions will play as importantly as anything happening on screen. Even in its later, more melancholy moments, it is never anything less than utterly compelling. Parasite somehow manages to scratch every cinematic itch you have and offers more up you didn’t know you had. Frankly, it’s everything you want from a film. And it’s one you won’t be able to stop talking about.

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With an insightful and searing exploration of human behavior, ‘Parasite’ is a masterfully crafted film that is a definite must watch.

Parasite Movie Review: A captivating, sensational social satire

• Times of India

Parasite - Official Trailer

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Bong Joon Ho

Sin-Ae Kwak

Kaushik Biswas 7626 708 days ago

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

User kushwaha 783 days ago

Vishal sethi 1045 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 1122 days ago

Subhrayu Mondal 1127 days ago

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

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• This film marks the first collaboration of uncle-nephew duo Anil Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor. Arjun is the son of Anil’s brother Boney Kapoor. Share
• This film marks the first collaboration of uncle-nephew duo Anil Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor. Arjun is the son of Anil’s brother Boney Kapoor.
• This is the second time Arjun Kapoor is playing a double role, the first being Aurangzeb (2013).
• The song ‘Yamma yamma’ from ‘Shaan’ is sampled in the song ‘Partywali Night' for the film.

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Parasite Movie Analysis, Synopsis and Ending Explained (Video Essay)

P arasite director Bong Joon-ho’s insightful and engaging comedy/thriller became one of the most talked-about films of the year and set a new precedent for the mark a South Korean movie can leave on United States’ movie-going audiences. The film is packed with social commentary, thrilling moments, and plenty of meaty writing worthy of a full ‘ Parasite movie analysis’.

Watch: Parasite Explained in 15 Story Beats

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Parasite Movie Synopsis - what is Parasite about

Parasite synopsis: pulling off the con.

What is Parasite about? The first half of Parasite plays out largely as a comedy-drama with a compelling narrative and thought-provoking themes. We’ll be taking a look at all of the ingredients to made Parasite one of the best films of 2019 and one of the best South Korean films ever made , but first, let’s get started with a Parasite synopsis.

The Kim family lives in a semi-basement and struggles to keep food on the table. They take on odd jobs for cash like folding pizza boxes, and they rely on unprotected wi-fi networks and street-cleaning pesticides to keep their home insect-free.

Parasite movie synopsis  •  street-cleaning pesticides

Ki-woo, the son, is gifted a scholar’s stone or suseok by a friend and given a recommendation for a tutoring job with a wealthy family. Ki-woo and his sister Ki-jung forge credentials for the job, and thus begins the long-con that sees each member of the Kim family infiltrating the upper-class Park family one-by-one. There are plenty of examples of subtle foreshadowing all throughout this opening act that circle back around by the end of the film.

Parasite meaning conveyed in screenplay excerpt

If you are interested in reading through the rest of the script, you can find it below. And, if you would like a deep-dive into the inner workings of the screenplay, be sure to read our Parasite script teardown.

Full Script PDF Download

Ki-jung begins working for the parks under the guise of an art-therapy teacher. Ki-taek, the father, begins working as the Park family chauffeur after the Kims have removed their previous chauffeur from his position, and similarly Chung-sook, the mother, replaces Moon-gwang, the housekeeper who has served the home longer than the Park’s have even lived there. Chung-sook is framed as deceiving the family by hiding a dangerous illness. The real deception is carried out by the Kims, and it works flawlessly.

Ki-taek with the scholar’s stone

The contrast in appearance between the Kims’ semi-basement home and the lavish home of the Park family is impossible to miss. The brilliant set dressing of Parasite combined with the striking architectural-design choices perfectly reinforce the themes of the film, but more on the themes after we finish our Parasite summary.

For some Parasite movie analysis straight from the auteur himself, check out this scene breakdown from Bong Joon-ho . Alongside actor Choi Woo-sik, he explains the significance of production design elements from the beginning of the film, such as the cultural context of scholar’s stones in South Korea and the idea of distant hope conveyed by the semi-basement window.

What is Parasite about? Parasite analysis straight from the director

Once the entire Kim family is employed in the Park household, the lower-class con-artists begin to assume more and more of this fabricated identity of wealth. They take the affluent home as their own while the Parks are away… and that’s when Moon-gwang shows back up and everything changes. Let’s shift gears from a Parasite summary to a Parasite movie analysis.

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What is Parasite About?

Parasite analysis: navigating the shift.

At its exact mid-point, Parasite undergoes a massive tonal shift. In our Parasite movie analysis video, this mid-point scene was the focus.

Be sure to watch our video essay on the scene for more detail and deeper Parasite analysis.

Parasite Genre Shift  •  Subscribe on YouTube

A tonal shift this extreme could easily take viewers out of the film or feel like a jumping-the-shark moment, but in the hands of Bong Joon-ho, this shift is portrayed in a way that not only feels effortless but greatly enhances each half of the film that preceded and follows it.

What is Parasite about? This excerpt reveals the script’s major plot twist

Moon-Gwang’s return to the house and eventual reveal of the secret basement keeps us on the edges of our seats as viewers and seamlessly blends from the drama/comedy centered first half into the thriller/tragedy centered latter half. Bong Joon-ho displays a mastery over genres and tones with this mid-point shift.

Did You Know?

Lee Jeong-eun, who plays Moon-Gwang the housekeeper, also provided the vocalization for Okja the super pig in Bong Joon-ho’s previous film.

Parasite synopsis

Parasite ending: orchestrating chaos.

Following the film’s major twist, Parasite continues in a far darker tone until it’s ending. In our Parasite movie analysis, we found that although the tone and style change, the themes at play remain consistent from the first half to the second half, and continue to be developed further as the film progresses.

Parasite’s final scene, in case you want a refresher on the chaos

For additional insights into director Bong Joon-ho’s creative process, listen to him discuss his decisions and directorial style with the other 2019 DGA nominees for best director including Martin Scorsese , Quentin Tarantino , Taika Waititi , and Sam Mendes :

Parasite summary and meaning discussed by filmmakers

Power shifts from Moon-gwang and her incognito husband to the Kim family as both lower-class families fight for leverage over each other. Both parties have dark secrets, and both threaten to expose the other to the Park family, who remain above all the drama, currently unaware. The film’s social commentary on class is at its strongest in this depiction of the lower classes fighting against each other rather than against the 1% who truly hold more accountability.

Outside of the sub-basement, violence erupts, and the prophetic scholar’s stone becomes an instrument of violence. Blood is shed and deaths are cast at the birthday party of the Park family’s youngest child.

All three families at play are damaged by this explosive act of violence. The Kim family is destroyed; Ki-jung is killed, Ki-woo is left brain-damaged, and Ki-taek is forced into hiding after he snaps and acts out a classism-driven murder in the chaos of the birthday party. The metaphorical themes are presented in as literal a way as possible with the act of this stabbing.

Ki-woo questions if his class prevents him from fitting in

Parasite’s ending features a sequence of Ki-woo’s plan to work hard, buy the house under which his own father now hides, and reunite the family… but this plan is nothing but a fantasy. The real Parasite movie ending is more bleak and, unfortunately, more realistic.

To explain Parasite’ s ending, we turn to the director’s own words: “You know and I know - we all know that this kid isn't going to be able to buy that house. I just felt that frankness was right for the film, even though it's sad." The emotionally-affecting resonance of the ending is the perfect cap to the wonderfully layered social commentary spread throughout the film.

But, before we dig deeper into the social commentary, let’s take a look at how the film managed to break through to an unmatched audience size.

• What is a motif in film? →
• The best movies of 2019, ranked →
• How to set dress like Bong Joon-ho →

Parasite 2019 Film

The spread of parasite.

Parasite has proven to be a groundbreaking achievement for South Korean movies. For years the country has been producing some of the finest films and directors in the world of cinema, but Parasite has crossed new milestones in terms of global impact.

Parasite director Bong Joon-ho became the first South Korean filmmaker to win best director at the academy awards. Has also tied the record with Walt Disney for most Oscars awarded to an individual at a single ceremony. This is especially impressive given how ethnocentric the Academy Awards often unfold, prioritizing English-language films over foreign-language films much of the time.

Parasite 2019 cleans up at the Academy Awards

Parasite was not just the first South Korean film to win the foreign language prize at the Oscars but also the first foreign language film from any country to win the overall best picture prize. Equally impressive was Parasite becoming the first South Korean movie to win the Palme d’Or, which is the top prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.

Parasite makes history by winning the Palme d’Or

Parasite was the first film since Marty in 1955 to win the top prize of both The Oscars and the Cannes Film Festival. These two powerhouse awards ceremonies rarely overlap and are comprised of entirely different audiences and judges and with entirely different viewing criteria and preferences. It speaks wonders to Parasite’s accessibility that it was received so well with such widely varying viewers.

The 2012 Academy Awards:

The Artist , a French and Belgian production, won best picture at the 2012 Academy Awards but was ineligible for the best foreign language film category as it is a silent film.

It wasn’t just awards records that Parasite broke in 2019. Parasite broke a number of financial records as well, including the highest foreign film opening weekend of all time for the UK box office, and a number of records with the Indie Box Office.

The record-setting trend continued for the Parasite film. After being added Hulu’s catalogue for exclusive streaming, it became the platform’s most streamed film in both the independent and foreign film categories, reaching even more audience members and wowing them with its immaculate presentation and resonant themes.

The cultural swell around Parasite is much deserved and hopefully leads more audience members to check out Parasite director Bong Joon-ho’s previous films and more South Korean cinema in general.

Parasite 2019 Meaning

Perfecting social commentary.

“What is the movie Parasite about?” has many answers. One clear way to explain the movie is: “ Parasite is about class.” Class is the primary target of social commentary within Parasite.

And every single element of the film from the scholar’s stone, to the architecture of the homes, to the very names of the families all contribute to this central theme. It’s no accident that the lower-class protagonists happen to have the single most common surname in South Korea.

Parasite 2019: The Kim family

It is one of the most effective satires in recent memory. For a quick breakdown on satire, including a segment on Parasite , here's an explainer that will answer all your questions about how satire works.

3 Types of Satire Explained  •   Subscribe on YouTube

Parasite has a lot worthy of analysis and it has a lot to say. One of the main reasons why Parasite was such a massive success around the whole world in 2019 is because of its themes and messages of classism and the wealth divide, which are truly universal. These themes cross all cultural-barriers and can speak to the 99% anywhere in the world.

The topic of class is one that Bong Joon-ho has a clear fascination with. He’s skewered classicism in all of his films to some degree. Prior to Parasite in 2019, his most focused social commentary on class was found in his 2013 film Snowpiercer which saw the lower class positioned at the back of a train in squalid conditions while the wealthy lived large at the head of the train.

This same subject of class is less overt in Parasite but far more grounded and effectively subtle to the point of never overshadowing the story being told for the sake of its themes.

Tilda Swinton monologues about class in Snowpiercer  •  2013

For a full deep-dive analysis into how the themes of Parasite were previously tackled in Bong Joon-ho’s other films, check out this video essay on the subject:

Parasite 2019 movie analysis

The Kim family may be below the Parks in status, but even they can look down on Moon-gwang and her husband. This secret basement reveals an even lower level of status below what we had thought was the floor with the Kim family.

Elevation clearly equates to status; the park’s have a multi-level home at the top of the hill while the Kim’s live below street level in a semi-basement, and the surprise 3rd party lives deep underground in a sub-basement. This vertical comment on status is illustrated cleanly in this alternate poster for the film, without spoiling the sub-basement reveal.

The flooding sequence, as depicted on the poster, also illustrates how the wealthy are unaffected by many of the debilitating circumstances that affect the lower classes as they are, quite literally, above the trouble.

Parasite movie analysis in poster form

Parasite represents the most focused and refined approach to class as a subject that Bong Joon-ho has achieved, and that’s certainly saying something given his impressive body of work.

How to set-dress like Bong Joon-ho

For more Parasite movie analysis, check out our article on how Bong Joon-ho creates meaning through set dressing. The article breaks down how to identify and breakdown set elements in a screenplay. Follow along with the Parasite script as StudioBinder is used to recreate what the actual script breakdown may have looked like.

Up Next: Set dressing in Parasite →

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Movie Review — “Parasite” Movie Review: A Cinematic Masterpiece

"Parasite" Movie Review: a Cinematic Masterpiece

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Published: Sep 12, 2023

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An unforgettable narrative, social commentary at its finest, a global cinematic impact.

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‘godzilla x kong’ tag-teaming towards $175m+ global bow – international box office, netflix unveils trailer for korean sci-fi ‘parasyte: the grey’.

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Netflix unveiled the trailer for upcoming Korean sci-fi series Parasyte: The Grey today.

Helmed by Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho , Parasyte: The Grey follows Su-in (played by Jeon So-nee ), a young woman caught in a war between humans and parasitic creatures. 

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The series is based on the best-selling manga Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwaaki, which sold over 25 million copies in over 30 regions and countries. In Netflix’s live action adaptation, the story is set in Korea . 

Citing the manga as one of the biggest influences in his filmmaking career, director Yeon said: “To me, Parasyte is about coexistence, so I wanted Parasyte: The Grey to echo this theme. I questioned whether people could peacefully coexist with other organisms or mutants unlike themselves.” 

Manga creator Iwaaki added: “I felt that the creators of Parasyte: The Grey greatly respected the original work. At the same time, I could see unique creative branches and ideas throughout the series and enjoyed it as both the original author and as a true ‘audience member’.” 

Netflix has adapted several mangas into live action series, including One Piece , which premiered in August 2023. The series topped the streamer’s Global charts for English-language shows for three straight weeks, accumulating 75.5 million hours viewed during that time, with Netflix confirming that the show will be renewed for a second season.

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‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ Review: A Splendid Ewan McGregor Finds the Silver Lining in Societal Collapse

Ben travers.

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Ewan McGregor is no stranger to accents. The Scottish star earned an Emmy nomination for playing Minnesotan twins on “Fargo,” won TV ‘s highest honor for embodying the Iowa-born, Manhatten-bred Halston (in Ryan Murphy’s “Halston”), and should have an Oscar on his shelf for belting out impeccable love ballads as Christian , the smitten English author in “Moulin Rouge!” He’s channeled a stock American accent enough times for U.S. audiences to forget his natural intonation and tweaked his rounded enunciation to befit everything from salmon to sea otters .

“A Gentleman in Moscow” depicts a collapsing society filled terrified citizens struggling to understand ass-backwards revisionism. Its parallels to modern times are clear enough — whether your mind goes to Russia’s abominable attacks on Ukraine or America’s own amoral assaults on education, bodily autonomy, you name it — yet these issues go largely unremarked upon. This “Gentleman” is persistently apolitical, preferring to highlight humanity’s capacity for compassion rather than point fingers at the invading armies or oppressive political parties who lack it. While an unwillingness to engage more thoroughly can be frustrating, it’s McGregor’s accent, along with the ensemble’s hodgepodge of vaguely European voices and a sheltered vantage point from inside a beautifully adorned hotel, that invites viewers to enjoy a pleasant stay. Ben Vanstone’s adaptation of Amor Towle’s 2016 novel may not be capital-I Important , but it’s effective in its mission to civilize via niceties.

Assigned a diligent watchdog named Osip (Johnny Harris), Alexander is told he’ll be killed if he ever steps foot outside his opulent lodgings. At first, that’s just fine with our Count. Alexander understands what he’s lost (his freedom) and appreciates what he’s been spared (a spot along the firing line), but his unflappable cheeriness during his initial months at the Maripol can also be attributed to a relatively undisturbed routine. He’s grown accustomed to a certain standard of living, and it’s a standard the five-star hotel can continue to meet. Life imprisonment isn’t exactly “hard time” when you can get a professional shave and a haircut every week, dine in a restaurant with white tablecloths and tuxedo-clad servers each night, and mingle with guests from the outside world as they frequent the best nightly residence in all of Moscow.

But those guests have a funny effect on Alexander. Soon, a prince (Paul Ready) he knew from back in the day arrives as hired help. He’s there to play violin for the dinner guests, and he’s already plotting his escape from indentured servitude. Both he and Alexander have been deemed “social parasites,” which is exactly what it sounds like: people who live off the collective work of others. To be fair, they have been. They’re royals. In Lenin-era Russia, such parasites are punished, and some such parasites can’t cope. While the paupered prince feels he has to flee (for his safety or his suffering, it’s not always clear), Count Alexander welcomes his own humbling circumstances (as a punishment for past sins). Then, with a depressive swing here and a mournful period there, he sees beyond his insulated perspective thanks to a steady surge of diverse guests. Huzzah! Growth, even in captivity.

Luckily, the cast steers us (sometimes quite strongly) in the right direction. Essential aides along Alexander’s evolution include Anna Urbanova (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an actress who takes a liking to the curious, curly-haired creature living in her favorite hotel. Then there’s Nina (Alexa Goodall), a fellow captive who moves through the Maripol as if it only has four exterior walls. There’s no room she can’t enter, no secret she can’t divulge, and her friendship with Alexander showcases Victor Molero’s striking production design (an elegant combination of inky yet vivid greens, browns, and reds that pairs nicely with naturalistic spotlighting). An old family friend Mishka (Fehinti Balogun) feels all the more amiable because of McGregor and Balogun’s earnest rapport, while Harris’ Osip makes for a fine Javert stand-in even before the “Les Miserables” inspector gets name-checked.

Winstead and McGregor craft another fine romance together (after both “Fargo” and their real-life marriage in 2022), but “A Gentleman in Moscow” belongs to its Count. With a glint in his eye and spring in his step, McGregor mounts a character-centric charm offensive from the jump, winning us over to Alexander’s perspective before we even really know him. That changes soon enough, and while the Count’s past may not be as shocking as brief flashbacks repeatedly tease, McGregor guides us through even the clichéd beats with complete conviction. So often, it’s just his attentive gaze that holds you rapt; his dogged dedicated to each moment matching Alexander’s unyielding positivity across the years.

“A Gentleman in Moscow” premieres Friday, March 29 on Paramount+ with Showtime. New episodes will be released via streaming every Friday and air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on Showtime.

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