About Parasite
A poor Seoul family talks its way one by one into the employ of a wealthy household perched on a hillside. Bong Joon Ho choreographs the swap with the precision of a heist movie and then, halfway through, opens a basement door that nobody can quite close again. The first non-English-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars and the rare social satire whose final image is genuinely a knife twist.
Released in 2019 and running a tight 2h 12m, Parasite sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in Korean, with English subtitles at participating venues. Read a contemporary review — useful before you book a ticket.
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Bong Joon Ho belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Parasite is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Bong Joon Ho currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow the festival circuit notes from the criticism outlets linked at the bottom of this page.
Cast
The principal cast — Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception. Cast notes and credits are useful for tracking through other adjacent indie work.
Where to watch Parasite
Currently playing in 12 US cities across our directory. The deepest scheduling is in:
- Telluride, CO — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Narberth, PA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Leesburg, VA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Grandview Heights, OH — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Philadelphia, PA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Seattle, WA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- San Jose, CA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Las Vegas, NM — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Melbourne, FL — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Yankton, SD — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Rhinebeck, NY — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Hampton, VA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory, or browse the next seven days of showtimes for last-minute additions.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Parasite is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 12m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas listed in the schedule above are the venues currently doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition. Programmer notes are sometimes the fastest way to triangulate which other films share a sensibility.