Gripping thrillers and ‘Eat the Rich’ dramas: 10 movies to watch if you like ‘Parasite’
Cinema before the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 feels like a lifetime ago, and typically, one year before the pandemic began, the industry was in fine form. Not only had Quentin Tarantino released his magnum-opus Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Greta Gerwig had hit the target once again with Little Women, but South Korean director Bong Joon-ho had stolen the limelight with his ‘Eat the Rich’ thriller Parasite.
Becoming the first foreign movie ever to take home the coveted Oscar for ‘Best Picture’, Parasite also joined an elite club of films to take home both the Academy’s most prized trophy as well as the Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival. Seizing the attention of audiences and critics alike, the film is a pertinent tale of social injustice, in which a poor South Korean family attempts to infiltrate a rich home.
A sharp thriller with venomous fangs, Parasite was one of those rare dramas that felt both incredibly enjoyable and extremely rewarding to watch, with this also being demonstrated throughout the rest of Bong Joon-ho’s filmography. As a result, lovers of the ‘Best Picture’ winner flocked to the director’s other films, pouncing on such classics as 2006’s The Host and 2003’s Memories of Murder.
The essence of Parasite is, indeed, difficult to bottle, yet, alongside the South Korean director’s other films, there lies a wealth of other thrillers and ‘Eat the Rich’ dramas that are equally as rewarding.
Scintillating thriller movies like Parasite
Released just two years before Parasite was another thriller movie that had a similar effect on critics and general audiences: Jordan Peele’s Get Out. A brilliantly constructed drama that shares a socially conscious core, just like Parasite, Peele’s film feels similarly enjoyable and rewarding to watch, telling the story of a young man who visits his in-laws only to be exploited in the strangest possible way.
While not a socially conscious drama, Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges shares the bleak sense of humour that Joon-ho’s film does. Even though both movies share drastically different narratives, tonally, they feel oddly familiar, with both filmmakers focusing on human dramas with a spicy comedic tongue. With a stellar cast that includes the likes of Colin Farrell, Ralph Fiennes and Brendan Gleeson.
Sticking with the thriller-comedy hybrid for just a moment, fans of Parasite will also not regret watching Sriram Raghavan’s Andhadhun, a hugely underrated Indian Hindi-language film that, just like In Bruges, feels like the distant cousin of Parasite when it comes to tone. Released in 2018, the tale follows a blind pianist who is forced to report on a crime he knows nothing about after a series of bizarre events places him at the centre of a criminal offence.
Boxing off these thrillers is a double-bill of imposter-related flicks that tie directly into the drama at the core of Parasite, the fascinating true-crime documentary The Imposter and Steven Speilberg’s modern classic Catch Me If You Can. The former is one of the true-crime genre’s most untapped gems, a study into a middle-aged man who pretends to be a missing young boy. Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can is his best of the contemporary century, following the real-life con man Frank Abagnale Jr, who faked his way to success.
‘Eat the Rich’ movies like Parasite
Yes, Parasite is an excellent thriller, but it’s also one of contemporary cinema’s best examples of a delectable ‘Eat the Rich’ drama, in which the rich upper-class get their comeuppance. Times may have changed slightly since the 1960s, but Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? remains one of the greatest movies from this niche sub-genre, with its plot concerning the desperate contestants of a dance marathon remaining pertinent.
More recently, the same topic was explored in Hirokazu Koreeda’s dysfunctional family drama Shoplifters, which explored the desperate lives of those living on the very fringes of society. Just one year earlier, the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos had tackled the same subject, albeit in a totally different way, tackling the rich by telling the story of a boy stripped from ancient mythology who curses a rich surgeon who mistakenly kills his father.
From two movies which only nibble at the rich to one that tears the heads of the aristocracy and eats their organs like tapas, Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness is a popular favourite of modern cinema. Sharp and hilariously enjoyable, the critical darling follows a young couple who are invited onto a luxury yacht, only for the social rules of the marine hotel to be upended once it capsizes.
A similar critical and commercial hit that was admittedly a little more divisive was Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. Joon-ho’s Parasite may be more stylish and concise in its messaging and storytelling, but the film shares a gleeful sense of fun with Saltburn, with the latter following a newly enrolled student at Oxford University who falls in love with the identity of a fellow student who happens to live in an illustrious English manor house.
10 movies like Parasite
- Andhadhun (Sriram Raghavan, 2018)
- Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002)
- Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
- The Imposter (Bart Layton, 2012)
- In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)
- The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017)
- Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)
- Shoplifters (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2018)
- They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Sydney Pollack, 1969)
- Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund, 2022)
