At the 92nd Academy Awards, the movie Parasite made a shocking splash, winning 4 Oscars: best picture, directing, international feature film, and writing. This movie was a huge success within multiple facets of the film industry. Whether you are someone that doesn’t comprehend Korean or you do understand, the content will hit you no matter the circumstances. 

Mrs. Krapels, an English teacher at Cresskill High School, gave input about the movie from a non-Korean speaking perspective. Reflecting upon this, Mrs. Krapels says,  “I don’t feel like I missed out on anything, [but] that isn’t to say I didn’t.” 

In the past, various films have been poorly translated, whether from English to Korean or vise versa, making it difficult to follow the movie seamlessly. For example, the Korean translation of Avengers: Infinity War lacks accuracy, which ruins the actual viewing of the movie. With Parasite, Mrs. Krapels feels that she has been able to follow the movie sufficiently. On the other hand, people that are able to comprehend Korean notice where non-Korean speakers are lacking without knowing it. 

David Chu, a senior at Cresskill High School, specifically points out that the content of the subtitles became “lost in translation”. 

The amount of cursing serves as an example of this, as the Parasite translations include curses that do not reflect the Korean words being used. 

The differences between watching this movie as a Korean versus non-Korean viewer do not only include exact wording. In an interview with sophomore Lucia Park, she says, “I was able to understand a lot of the cultural references that the director was making throughout the movie such as the idea of semi-basement homes and the scholar stone showed prominently in the first part of the movie.” 

While translating word for word may be more simple, having those who are not familiar with Korean culture will not understand the cultural references touched upon within the movie. This is why Mrs. Krapels expressed an urge to see the movie another time, but with a person who can explain the cultural aspects of the movie that she cannot understand. 

One of the successes of the movie was making it easy for everyone to understand the class disparity. A very condensed synopsis of Parasite: a poor family finds employment working for a naive, rich family and they go to any extent to get the jobs, even being con-artists. As the movie progresses there are hints of the rich shaming the poor, like when the rich father covers his nose from an odor caused by the poor father working for him. However, once he covers his nose once too many times, the poor father loses it and kills him. He runs away from the incident and goes into hiding. 

One of the reasons Parasite won 4 Oscars is how smooth it was for a non-Korean audience to understand the movie. Parasite was able to overcome “the one-inch barrier of subtitles,” that Boon Jong Ho, the film’s director, mentioned in his award acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. Making an international film is no easy task because it can’t only appeal to the people of the culture. Most of the time, the foreign language films that do succeed in theaters are the ones that have a universal topic. Parasite did not have the perfect translation or perfect directing, yet there was a universal topic, which was about the class disparity. 

Not only that, but this movie succeeded in crossing genres. 

“I think that it is the rare action movie that can also be a really good movie. This was an action horror movie that was also social commentary,” stated Mrs. Krapels. 

However, other foreign film movies stay within their culture. For example, Train to Busan is a Korean movie about a man and daughter trapped in a speeding train going to Busan, a city in Korea, while there is a zombie outbreak. People that aren’t Korean wouldn’t understand the city of Busan, which is why it appeals to Koreans. 

Parasite comes off as a pessimistic critique of class warfare, however, the movie has much more substance beyond its surface. It reveals the life of living poor and the things that people are willing to do to enter a socially accepted group of people. This meaningful message that is shown makes it enjoyable to watch this movie.