Parasite Onward: A Deep Fall Without Depth

The class struggle thriller Parasite won the greatest number of awards at the prestigious international film festivals in 2020: four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Director; the Writers Guild Award for its screenplay; the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast; and the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In addition to this extraordinary recognition and accompanying accolades, Parasite marks a turning point as the first non-English language film recognized by winning the top Oscar for a movie. This film makes evident that language need not be a barrier to the universality of human emotion and the suffering of daily struggle. Director Bong's brilliant and profound storytelling explores the urgent global theme of class disparity that runs deep world-wide.

The central focus of this film revolves around the verticality of architectural structures as profoundly symbolic of the levels in which the human figures reside and for the stratification of the cultural context surrounding them; the residences themselves become, in a way, the main characters: a semi-basement dwelling, a hilltop mansion with a secret, subterranean bunker, all born from Director Bong Jun-Ho's geopolitical imagination. Each space represents the people who live within specific and dramatically different circumstances. The two houses are constructed on geographical high and low levels with the film characterized by an unusual number of steps, emphasizing the primary direction of the film. The families and the camera go up and down stairs countless times. While following the camera's eye, the audience is projected into the space, a complex maze with no way out; indeed, Minotaur is waiting at the end.

The gulf between the spacious, sunny hilltop mansion that sits above a prison-like bunker and the dirty, dark, partially below-ground apartment starkly reveals the dramatic contrast in lifestyles among the three families who a