Parasite(2019) is a comedy thriller written and directed by Bong Joon Ho. It has been one of the most talked movie 2019 and won the best picture in 2020 Oscars as well as won many other awards for its outstanding cinematography and direction.

Let’s brief the story before we go into details, Movie starts with a shot of very poor family (Ki-Taek's Family) father and mother and 2 young teenagers (Ki – Woo and Ki - Jung) they have no zero luxury life and family seek for some fortune to happen, luckily their son (Ki – Woo) got a job in a higher class family as an English tutor. He got this opportunity with the help of his friend (Min) and he got the help of his sister is very talented in Photoshop to make a fake certificate. So his sister forged the degree certificate to face the interview. After Ki – Woo got the job he convinced Mr. Park’s wife to take his sister as the art teacher for the Da-Song (Mr. Park’s child). One by one all family members got a job at Mr. Park’s house and the plot goes like that and the mysteries are about to unfold in this house.


 Now we will focus on the techniques that helped this movie to be outstanding work of the art of movie-making.

Cinematic language

The clever use of Cinematic language has been very helpful for the success of this movie because communication is a very important factor in a movie and the director wants to directly communicate with the audience without using that much of dialogues. since this is a South Korean movie and all the dialogues are going to be in the Korean Language, so you can’t expect this movie to be a global success without using these communication techniques. Because of this matter, you can see Bong Joon-ho (Director) using a lot of Symbols and many other communication techniques to convey the story to the audience.

 So It’s easy to refer to the scenes in the movie to point out the few times that Bong Joon-ho (Director) used Cinematic language to convey the pre-information that he wants the audience to subconsciously (Without telling them directly) feel so that it will set the audience in the right pathway.


 So let’s look at some examples where Ki-Taek's Family was introduced to the movie in the first couple of scenes from the movie

alley house where Ki - taek's family lived in parasite movie


 1.  In the 1st scene, the main idea was to move the camera from alleyway to the basement level living room where the cameraman shows the outside world through the windows and slowly pan down the camera to reveal the house situated beneath the floor. As Bong Joon-ho (Director) is constantly trying to emphasize the poverty of this Ki-Taek's family he uses these special camera movements all the time.


 2.  In the 2nd scene when the bug smoker approaches their alley to smoke the area they left the windows open so that the smoke will come inside and kill the bugs in the house. This shows that Ki-Taek's family is poor to even purchase a bug cleaner to the house.


 3.  In the 3rd scene Ki – Woo and Ki - Jung is trying to catch the neighbor’s Wi-Fi so that they can use it for free, to catch the Wi-Fi they had to go to the toilet which is the best place to catch the neighbor’s Wi-Fi. You can see in the shot that even the toilet is placed above them which shows the current level this family is living right now they are literally living under the ground.


 4.  The last scene director shows us a drunk person vomits in front of their house and won’t even care about the households. This particular drunk man comes to this place more than this occasion to show that the alley they are living has zero value to it and nobody cares about the people live in that alley or even in the area.

The movie starts with the introduction to Ki-Taek's family living place, it was beneath the ground immediately making a metaphorical statement about the state of Ki-Taek's family and it also emphasizes the poverty of this family as well as the poor lives of all the peoples who are living in that area especially in that alley.


 As you can see that Ki-Woo, going to take this tutor job in this wealthy family (Mr. Park's Family) so when Ki – Woo went to the Park’s family house situated in the uphill, the cameraman follows him in a pathway going up and up until they reach this very quiet nice beautiful house situated in the uphill neighborhood. Director used this chain of scenes to show the contrast between these two families and it’s very essential to the movie that these two families and their particular qualities and members are introduced to the audience in a very clear way.

First few minutes of the movie was all about developing and introducing these 2 families to the audience and drawing a clear between Ki-Taek's and Park’s so cinematography and cinematic language has been highly used to achieve this effect

 In this first few scenes, the movie brought up this new character Min who is a friend of Ki – Woo, Min bringing this stone some kind of Chinese symbol of wealth.

Movie always goes with this metaphorical language to tell us the story it never uses “poor” or “rich” in the dialogues to describes these peoples but this movie is all about the struggle and clash between POOR and RICH.
Let’s take a look at another example This where Ki- Woo is going to Mr. Park’s place for the first time.



We can see here how the cinematic language used to create a contrast between these 2 families, by showing the way to the house was always going up and up panning the camera up and revealing sun lights so using all these symbols and techniques to show the audience the difference between these 2 families. So this is all about plotting the story and developing characters just starting to tell the story.


 In the later part of the movie there was a moment where Ki-Taek's family is enjoying the luxury they never had before because of Mr. Park and the other family has gone camping and house was under Ki-Taek's family authority for a few days and they were taking maximum out of the opportunity, eating every food enjoy the beauty they never got in their dark alley. Suddenly they had stopped all of that because the wealthy family was coming home. The directors show that in the rain they were heading back to the downtown of the city with using all the possible ways of dark and rain situation to emphasize how much down they lived exactly considering with the wealthy family.



For the rich people, the rain is a blessing because it’s going to clear the dark sky and they can start afresh new morning and fresh aroma out of the wet ground. But for the Ki-Taek's family and the people who are living in the dark alley it’s a different story, you can see in the above 04 scenes that after they sneak out from Mr. Park’s house they went back to their alley and the director shows us the route they took in that rainstorm, they were going down and down until the lowest part of the city which is their dark Alley drowned in drain water and their house is flooded with water which sums up how rainstorm can affect 2 different families living in the same city but differed by the money.

CONTRAST

ki - taek's family struggle after rainstorm in parasite movie

The two scenes show how such a simple two short scenes can tell a big flaw in the society and the director cleverly placed these two cuts one after the other so that the audience can make their own comparison on these two sides of society. While some people fight for some attires others are planning parties.

So the movie Parasite is all about visual language rather than traditional dialogues and success of the movie prove point itself, Universal language (Cinematic language) is more impactful and has the potential to reach a vast audience than spoken language. That’s why this movie became a global success even though it was done by Korean.

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