Bong Joon-ho unleash­es house­hold may­hem in the Par­a­site trailer

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.