Parasite is one of those rare films that cannot be adequately described without diminishing it. To say it is a black comedy about a poor family infiltrating a wealthy one is accurate and useless. It is a film that changes genre every twenty minutes and makes each shift feel inevitable.

The Kim family lives in a semi-basement in Seoul, scraping by with informal work. When Ki-woo talks his way into a tutoring position with the wealthy Park family, his relatives follow, each installing themselves in household positions under false pretenses. And then something beneath the Parks’ house changes everything.

Bong Joon-ho shoots the film with meticulous attention to architecture. The distance between the Kim household and the Park household is not just geography. It is argument. The film’s visual language embeds its class analysis so deeply into space and movement that you absorb it before you can articulate it.

Parasite was the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It deserved every award it received.