“Mother” — a 2009 thriller about the overprotective mother of a mentally disabled boy suspected of murder — was also a huge success.

His 2013 film “Snowpiercer” depicted a dystopian future in which the last humans on Earth — who survived a failed attempt to stop global warming — travel endlessly on a train separated by class, and the lower class revolts.

Tilda Swinton, who was in “Snowpiercer,” also starred in Bong’s Netflix-produced 2017 sci-fi action-adventure “Okja” about a country girl trying to save a genetically-engineered beast from a greedy multinational firm.

It missed out on a Cannes prize but raised debates about factory farming and animal exploitation.

“Bong’s films come at seminal moments for the Korean film industry,” Jason Bechervaise, a professor at Korea Soongsil Cyber University, told AFP.

The unprecedented worldwide acclaim for his latest work, he said, was driven by the fact that “there’s a great deal of political rage out there exacerbated by a tangible sense of widening social equality, and ‘Parasite’ feeds into this very effectively”.