Beyond Parasite: the genius of Bong Joon Ho

While we weren’t looking, the countries we used to patronise for their charming but niche ‘World Cinema’, started making movies often classier, more interesting and definitely less woke than we do in the English-speaking world. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in South Korea.

South Korean directors have mastered the horror genre, with classics such as Train to Busan (featuring the modern ‘fast zombies’ on steroids) and nail-biting The Wailing. And thanks to Bong Joon-Ho, they’ve cracked the commercial mainstream, too. Cinephiles have known he was great for sometime. But in the West, until Parasite won a triple crown of Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay in 2019, Bong was certainly no household name.

He may have just finished two new, hotly anticipated scripts – one in Korean, the other in English, but many of Joon Ho’s earlier films were cruelly overlooked by Hollywood. Bong hit back by cattily describing the Oscars as ‘very local’ in a bemused post-award interview.