2019 was the year of resounding triumph for Korean cinema. The country, whose films had never won a Cannes’ Golden Palm or even been nominated for an Oscar, filled these gaps in one fell swoop — thanks to Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite — and became known through festivals and awards like a shockwave. After the Oscar triumph, a surge of interest in Korean cinematography spread throughout the world, with Korean films being re-released in the cinemas, from Moscow to Los Angeles. 

It has not just been with the release of Parasite that Korean cinema has emerged on the global stage. Critics hailed Oldboy as a new classic more than ten years ago, and Joint Security Area by the same Park Chan-wook and Memories of a Murder by Bong Joon-ho are frequently mentioned on lists of the 21st century’s best films. More recently, Train to Busan has been acclaimed as one of the best zombie apocalypse films ever made. However, all these examples of critical acclaim have come only since the turn of the millennium, before which the Korean cinema industry was relatively small and unknown. 

The growth in international recognition was not brought about by a sudden change in production style in Korean cinema. Rather, the rest of the world simply began to slowly pay more attention. While Korea's neighbors in the film industry, Japan and Hong Kong, were already becoming famous around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, Korean cinema remained a local phenomenon, rarely receiving attention outside the country. While the entire world, led by American critics, admired the films of Kurosawa and Wong Kar-wai, few people knew about the new wave in Korea’s film industry. It wasn't until the 1990s that local cinematography entered international markets, partly because of political and economic changes in Korea, and partly in response to the increased demand for Asian cinema abroad.

In fact, since the beginning of the century, Korean cinema has established itself as a supplier of probably the finest modern genre films — thrillers, detectives, and cruel horrors. It has filled a niche that is these days missing from the Western movie industry: the niche of the genre cinema, the loss of which in Hollywood has been blamed on blockbuster production houses such as Disney and Marvel. Genre cinema is normally associated with extreme emotions, which many believe have no place in Hollywood. In conservative — even sometimes puritan — Hollywood, the internalized biases of directors and viewers are strong, and they perceive any deviation from their standards as a deliberate act of protest. But the Western viewer forgives all taboos for foreign cinema. And the secret of Korean cinema’s success, to an extent, lies in that freedom. After Oldboy became a sensation — even getting an appraisal from Quentin Tarantino — Western viewers recognized Korean cinema as primarily a brand of stylish and outrageous violence. Because of the image solidified through one successful movie, for some time, Korean cinema became a victim of fetishism. Western critics liked to emphasize certain cultural values exclusive to Koreans and Asians, attempting to explain the popularity of such films, and failing to realize that they were seeing only a tiny subsection of an existing national movie industry. This perception of Korean films changed only more recently with the spread of Hallyu, the Korean wave. So it's hardly surprising that critics may know and love Oldboy, but remain unaware of Korean classics such as Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid.

Parasite in this context was not a radically new turn for Korean cinema, but rather a logical result of all national cinematic achievements. It's not that much better than Oldboy and not more poignant than Memories of Murder, but it's an accurate, unique, and flawlessly produced film that delivers an important message about inequality that transcends language and borders. Parasite is not a sudden breakthrough in Korean cinematography. Rather, its success resulted from Western viewers and critics finally discovering that not all Korean cinema is about elegant brutality and rivers of blood. As Bong Joon-ho himself said, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”