Parasite 2019
Directed by Bong Joon-ho, who wrote it with Han Jin-won; it was released in South Korea in October 2019 and stars Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, and Choi Woo-shik. The lower-class Kim family cons its way, one member at a time, into working for the wealthy Park family, until a returning housekeeper reveals a man who has been hiding in the basement for four years to escape loan sharks. Sean and Amanda read it as a class satire that refuses a clean villain: everyone is both parasite and host, complicit and trapped by the system. They dwell on the tripartite design (the Parks up the hill, the Kims in a semi-basement, the hidden man further down), the smell the Parks keep flinching from as a marker of class, the scholar's rock that turns into a weapon, and the reversal that turns on the one sense film can't transmit. Sean first saw it at Telluride after it had already won the Palme d'Or. It won four of its six Oscars at the February 2020 ceremony (Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and International Feature), lost Editing to Ford v Ferrari and Production Design to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and took the SAG Ensemble award. It topped the New York Times' century poll with both critics and readers, holds a 97 on Metacritic, and grossed over $200 million worldwide, the studio goodwill that let Bong make Mickey 17. The hosts name Memories of Murder as the close-second Bong pick they left off, and point to The Housemaid, Us, and Shoplifters as company for it.