IELTS Speaking Part 2: Describe a Film You Have Watched

I'd like to talk about a film called Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, which I watched a few years ago and which remains one of the most fully realised films I've seen. I went into it knowing very little — a friend had said only "watch it without knowing anything" — which turned out to be excellent advice, because part of the film's power lies in the way it defies the categories you think you're in. On the surface, Parasite is the story of a poor Korean family that insinuates itself into the household of a wealthy family through a sequence of clever deceptions. But Bong uses this premise to make a precise and often darkly funny argument about class, aspiration, and the spatial organisation of inequality. There's a recurring motif about altitude — the wealthy family lives high on a hill while others live in semi-basement apartments that flood when it rains — which operates as both physical fact and social metaphor. What made it memorable was the precision of the filmmaking: nothing is accidental, and re-watching it you notice how carefully every element has been placed. But also its emotional intelligence — by the end of the film you feel sympathy for nearly every character, even those who have behaved badly, because Bong has made you understand the pressures that shaped them. I would absolutely recommend it to others. It's one of the rare films that genuinely changes how you look at something, in this case the nature of class and how we perform aspiration.