Parasite is the most formally precise film about class made in the twenty-first century. It is not the only one, and the thread it opens goes in several directions that Bong Joon-ho's film can't follow by itself.
THE BONG THREAD - KOREAN CLASS CINEMA
Memories of Murder (Bong, 2003): The police procedural as class argument. Two detectives from different class positions - one from Seoul, one from the provinces - disagree about everything. The case's failure is inseparable from the institutional failure that class produces in the investigation. Mother (Bong, 2009): Class as the condition that makes the legal system inaccessible. The mother who can't afford the legal infrastructure that would clear her son learns what the justice system looks like from the outside.
Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018): The class anxiety of the person who can't tell whether the wealth above them was earned or inherited or simply displayed. The young man watching Ben - who seems to have money and no visible source of it - is the film's argument about the invisibility of upper-class maintenance relative to the very visible effort of lower-class survival.
THE BRITISH THREAD - LOACH AND AFTER
I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016): The benefits system as the formal argument. A man who cannot work because of a heart condition is told by the system that he is fit for work. The Kafkaesque bureaucratic loop is the film. The formal argument is about what it means to be a citizen in a system designed to deny you the citizenship you're owed. Kes (Loach, 1969) for where it started - the class argument at its most formally simple and most emotionally complete.
Gypo (Jan Dunn, 2005): A Czech asylum seeker in South Wales. Less formally polished than Loach, more formally honest about what it feels like to be at the intersection of poverty and displacement. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009): The class argument made from the inside rather than the outside.
THE FRENCH THREAD - LA HAINE AND AFTER
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995): Twenty-four hours in the Paris banlieues following three young men in the aftermath of police violence. The black-and-white photography, the inverted countdown timer, the specific grammar of banlieue life that Paris itself can't see from the centre. The most formally accomplished French class film and the one most directly in conversation with Parasite's formal intelligence.
THE AMERICAN THREAD - TWO DIRECTIONS
The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017): The class argument from the perspective of a child who doesn't know she's poor. The specific way poverty looks when you don't have the vocabulary for it yet - the motel on the tourist corridor, the discount store runs, the transient community that doesn't see itself as transient. American Honey (Andrea Arnold, 2016): The same economic geography from the inside of the young person who has run out of options and is selling magazine subscriptions across middle America.
THE JAPANESE THREAD - SHOPLIFTERS
Shoplifters (Kore-eda, 2018): A found family held together by petty crime, living outside every institutional structure. The class argument is about what the people the institutional system has abandoned do to survive - and what it costs when the institution reasserts its claim on them. The most formally complete Japanese class film and the one most directly in conversation with Parasite's argument about family as a strategic arrangement.
Parasite is the most formally precise film about class made in the twenty-first century.