Parasite trailer: Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winner promises a grim social thriller revolving around Korean economy

The first official trailer for Bong Joon-ho’s Cannes sensation and Palme d’Or winner Parasite has been released. [caption id=“attachment_6735311” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] A still from Parasite.[/caption] Billed as a “pitch-black modern fairytale,” the film follows two very different families who find themselves tangled up in a complex bond that is threatened by encroaching outside forces. The trailer opens with  Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and his family who are unemployed and penniless, trying to sustain themselves. Things change when the son of the family decides to forge a degree certificate to land a tutoring job at the influential Park family. He further enlists his sister as an art therapist with the family.  The trailer then takes a grim and mysterious turn, with foreboding shots of the wealthy Park family and Ki-woo’s family, the entirety of which soon infiltrates the Park household as their various staff members. “As the Kims provide ‘indispensable’ luxury services while the Parks obliviously bankroll their entire household, a parasitic interloper threatens the Kims’ newfound comfort, a savage, underhanded battle for dominance breaks out, threatening to destroy the fragile ecosystem between the Kims and the Parks,” says the official description. Check out the trailer here

The film now marks the fourth collaboration between Bong and actor Song Kang-ho, who plays the patriarch of the penniless Kim family. Jang Hye-jin, Choi Woo-shik, and Park So-dam star as his wife, son, and daughter, with Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, and Lee Jung-eun rounding the cast.

Earlier, in July it was reported that Parasite was pulled out of China’s Film Festival owing to ’technical reasons’. In their statement released on social media, the festival organisers offered their apologises for the inconvenience. “The closing screening of Parasite originally scheduled for 28 July has been canceled for technical reasons,” read the statement.

_Parasite_  is slated to release in US theaters on 11 October.