On Sunday night, Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” morphed from a merely great film into a history-making phenomenon, becoming the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for best picture. It also won best director, best original screenplay and best international feature. Additionally, this South Korean horror-comedy, a radical parable of inequality, won the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the Writers Guild Award for best original screenplay and the best-ensemble prize from the Screen Actors Guild.

No foreign film has ever been so honored in this country. Besides the excellence of the filmmaking, there’s clearly something resonant about its bleak social vision, so different from anything coming out of Hollywood. Its reception is evidence of the same crisis of faith in capitalism that’s making Bernie Sanders into a front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

“Parasite” depicts a world where a chasm divides the rich, who live in airy minimalist splendor, and the poor, who exist — to a degree that becomes increasingly macabre as the film progresses — literally underground. American viewers might get the impression that South Korea is an extremely stratified society, and while they’d be right, it’s by some measures less unequal than our own. That makes the film’s fatalism about social mobility, so foreign to traditional American sensibilities, particularly bracing.