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

The script is based on Bong's source material from a play written in 2013. He later adapted it into a 15-page film draft, and it was split into three different drafts by Han. Bong stated that he was inspired by the 1960 Korean film The Housemaid, and by the Christine and Léa Papin incident in the 1930s. Filming began in May 2018 and finished that September. The project included cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, film editor Yang Jin-mo, and composer Jung Jae-il. Darcy Paquet, an American film critic and author, provided English translations for the film's international release.

Parasite premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2019, where it became the first Korean film to win its top prize, the Palme d'Or. It was released in South Korea by CJ Entertainment on 30 May, and was praised for Bong's direction and screenplay, and also for its editing and production design. It grossed over $263 million worldwide on a $15.5 million budget.

Among its numerous accolades, Parasite won the leading four awards at the 92nd Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film, becoming the first non English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It is the first South Korean film to receive any Academy Award recognition, and one of only three films overall to win both the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first such achievement in over 60 years.[note 2] It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language, and became the first non English-language film to win the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. It has since been cited as among the best films of the 2010s, the 21st century, and of all time. A television series based on it is in early development.

Production

The idea for Parasite originated in 2013. While working on Snowpiercer, Bong was encouraged by a theatre actor friend to write a play. He had been a tutor for the son of a wealthy family in Seoul in his early 20s and considered turning his experience into a stage production. The film's title, Parasite, was selected by Bong as it served a double meaning, which he had to convince the film's marketing group to use. Bong said "Because the story is about the poor family infiltrating and creeping into the rich house, it seems very obvious that Parasite refers to the poor family, and I think that's why the marketing team was a little hesitant. But if you look at it the other way, you can say that rich family, they're also parasites in terms of labor. They can't even wash dishes, they can't drive themselves, so they leech off the poor family's labor. So both are parasites."

Writing

Bong said the film was influenced by the 1960 Korean "domestic Gothic" film The Housemaid in which a middle-class family's stability is threatened by the arrival of a disruptive interloper in the form of household help. The incident of Christine and Léa Papin—two live-in maids who murdered their employers in 1930s France—also inspired him.

Bong also considered his own past, where he had tutored for a rich family. Bong said "I got this feeling that I was infiltrating the private lives of complete strangers. Every week I would go into their house, and I thought how fun it would be if I could get all my friends to infiltrate the house one by one." Additionally, Moon-gwang's allergy to peaches was inspired by one of Bong's university friends having this allergy.

Themes

The main themes of Parasite are class conflict, social inequality and wealth disparity.[47][48][49] Film critics and Bong Joon-ho himself have considered the film as a reflection of late-stage capitalism, and some have associated it with the term "Hell Joseon" (Korean: 헬조선), a satirical phrase which posits that living in hell would be akin to living in modern South Korea. This term came about due to high rates of youth unemployment, the intense demands of pursuing higher education, the crisis of home affordability, and the increasing socio-economic gap between the wealthy and poor.

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