The Oscar-winning Parasite, streaming from Monday, is among the most ingenious of home invasion movies. But this age-old genre seldom fails to surprise…
Not many good things have happened so far in 2020, but Parasite ruling the
Oscars in February ranks high among them. It took 92 years for the Academy to finally anoint a non-English-language film as the year’s best, and you couldn’t ask for a more electrifying movie to claim the milestone than Bong Joon-ho’s cool, crisp, genre-bending class-war thriller.
By the time cinemas shut down in March, Parasite had become the highest-grossing non-English-language film in
UK box office history. If you missed it, its home entertainment release on Monday (on all major streaming platforms, as well as DVD and Blu-ray) should come as a particular treat. The film’s intricate narrative reversals are best experienced with as little forewarning as possible, but it’s no spoiler to say that it ranks among cinema’s most ingenious revisions of an age-old genre: the home invasion movie. The premise of an impoverished working-class family posing as servants to cannily infiltrate an elegantly moneyed household is classical. Yet the social dynamics of the setup are subversive from the beginning, as Bong and his superb cast muddy and muddle our sympathies – the poorer family may technically be the invaders here, but who are the victims?