Bong Joon-ho unleashes household mayhem in the Parasite trailer

Class conflict takes a bloody turn in the South Korean master’s Palme d’Or winner.

Words

Charles Bramesco

@intothecrevasse

As he’s made a foray into the English language with his past two features Snowpiercer and Okja, Korea’s Bong Joon-ho has attained a new stature as one of the more well-known Asian filmmakers in the Western world. His latest feature Parasite returns the writer/director to his homeland and his native tongue, but it still might just be his biggest crossover sensation yet.

The newly released trailer for the Palme d’Or-winning film teases a twisted game, while leaving the particulars about its rules and players a mystery. But the clip leaves no question that something wicked is afoot, and that there will indeed be blood.

The plot concerns the impoverished Kim family, and their campaign to slowly usurp the household of their unwitting employers, the wealthier Park clan. Father and son con-artist team Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) gradually trick the Parks into hiring the rest of their family for domestic assistance, unaware that the new help is all in cahoots and scheming against them.

From there, things take a grisly and fully unexpected turn, so suffice to say at this time that the natural friction between the upper and lower classes mutates into a more violent version of itself. The rest is best kept under wraps, as Bong has carefully paced his film for a masterful narrative pull of the rug.

The trailer doesn’t give it all away, either. NEON’s marketing team hurls so many decontextualized images at us – a peach, a squirt of hot sauce, billowing clouds of insect-killing gas – that it’s impossible to tell what’s important, or why. For now, all the public can do is wonder with a faint sense of queasy terror; the very essence of suspense.

Parasite comes to theaters in the US on 11 October. A release date for the UK has yet to be set.

Published 14 Aug 2019

Tags: Bong Joon-ho

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