Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a masterwork that builds on the allegorical bite of Snowpiercer and Okja to become the best film of 2019.

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If you ever want to see the severe extremes of a class system, just look around any major city. Bong Joon-ho is aware of this, which is why he takes perverse pleasure in how he’s staged Parasite, a masterful passion play about the immense gap between those with money—lots and lots of money—and those without. While one family, the Kims, are introduced literally occupying space below sea level in a scuzzy apartment they insist is a “semi-basement,” another lives on a hill. Scratch that, the Park family lives above the hill, complete with a landscaped and walled off garden that acts like a mini-Eden above the unseen, urban riffraff.

Such are the incongruous realities of living in the same Seoul. Within this juxtaposition Joon-ho presents Parasite,...