We called it at Cannes and we were right: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite took home the Palme d’Or, a prize the genre-bending gut-punch most assuredly deserved. The film quickly nabbed a U.S. release date via Neon, and, though we had to wait a few months, a trailer has now arrived.
It focuses on the Kim family, who scrape by in a filthy hovel until Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) lucks into a job tutoring the daughter (Jung Ziso) of the well-off Park clan. Soon, he’s manipulating the family to secure more jobs for his sister (Park So-dam), his mother (Chang Hyae-jin), and his father (Kang-ho Song). “For its first hour or so, Parasite is pure diabolical fun: a kind of con-artist story where the con is turning one-percenters into unwitting job creators,” we wrote in our review. Soon, though, it “shifts tonal gears in total service of its class politics, infecting the film’s breezy dark-comedy with notes of rage and melancholy.”
That’s plenty evident in the below trailer, which begins with bits of oddball humor and curious behaviors before curdling into something eerie and violent. Check it out.
Here’s a plot synopsis:
Meet the Park Family: the picture of aspirational wealth. And the Kim Family, rich in street smarts but not much else. Be it chance or fate, these two houses are brought together and the Kims sense a golden opportunity. Masterminded by college-aged Ki-woo, the Kim children expediently install themselves as tutor and art therapist, to the Parks. Soon, a symbiotic relationship forms between the two families. The Kims provide “indispensable” luxury services while the Parks obliviously bankroll their entire household. When a parasitic interloper threatens the Kims’ newfound comfort, a savage, underhanded battle for dominance breaks out, threatening to destroy the fragile ecosystem between the Kims and the Parks.
Parasite infects theaters in New York and L.A. on October 11.