Bong Joon Ho

A family of unemployed people talks its way into a rich household one job at a time in Parasite, and the comedy of the con becomes something else with no warning that the turn is coming. Bong changes register inside a single scene and expects you to keep up. Detectives chase South Korea's first serial murders through a provincial town in Memories of Murder; the survivors in Snowpiercer are sorted front to back along a train by what they can pay. The institution is always what failed first, and in Okja the failure is a corporation that engineered an animal and then came to collect it. You laugh about ninety seconds before the floor goes, every time.

Signature

• Tone changed mid-scene and held there.
• Vertical and horizontal space encoding who is above whom.
• Institutions that are indifferent or incompetent.
• Genre premises settled as social argument.