Rewatching Parasite on Netflix is a good reminder that the Oscars get it right sometimes

The Academy Awards have had a spotty track record when it comes to awarding the Best Picture prize over the last couple of decades. Sure, sometimes the Academy gives the trophy to Oppenheimer, a verifiable classic and towering achievement in storytelling, but more often than that it goes to middling or outright bad films, like Nomadland, Green Book, Birdman, and Argo, or movies time has forgotten entirely, like The Artist or CODA. But now that Parasite has arrived on Netflix, it’s a great time to remind yourself that every once in a while, the Academy finds the strength to hand its biggest award to a movie that is truly special.

To say director Bong Joon-ho’s black comedy about class has aged well would be an understatement. Everything about Parasite’s story of the poor Kim family conning their way into the lives of those above them (both figuratively and literally) in the Korean social strata still works wonderfully on a thematic level. But what may surprise viewers upon revisit is just how bleakly funny the movie’s various sequences are.

No series of events in any movie from the last decade is as equally tense and horribly funny as the family’s poisoning of the Park family’s previous maid in order to get her replaced. Director Bong weaponizes his own excellent filmmaking and clever writing to drag the audience into a terribly uncomfortable position: We spend the sequence rooting for this family to exploit this woman’s allergies to steal her livelihood. It’s objectively awful, but so are the family’s circumstances.

Managing to keep our sympathies and the tension high for that entire scene would be impressive enough, but Bong Joon-ho manages to sustain that delicate balance through the entire film — something he seems to be continuing in his next movie, Mickey 17, if the trailers are any indication. Plenty of movies manage to mix in elements of horror, comedy, and thriller-like tension, but most of those movies do it in different places across their run time. One of the things that makes Parasite so terrifically unique is that every moment of the film feels infused with all these genres at once. This is also what makes it not just a worthy Best Picture winner, but a truly special one.

Of course, none of this Parasite praise is to say that the Academy hasn’t done anything right in the last two decades. Moonlight’s Best Picture win continues to set a shining example of what the Oscars can be, and nominated alongside Parasite were Little Women and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, both of which would have served as worthy winners. But, as we head into another month of discourse about a particularly weak crop of Best Picture nominees at this year’s Academy Awards, including a few truly bleak options, it’s worth heading to Netflix to remind ourselves of how lucky we are that Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece got the recognition it deserved.

Parasite is streaming on Netflix and available for digital rental/purchase on Amazon and Apple TV.