Director Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite is a film that defies genre. At once hilarious, thrilling, and haunting, this year’s winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor is a one-of-a kind-masterpiece with an ending (which will not be spoiled here) that will leave your mouth agape. “It is a Bong Joon Ho film,” the director says with a laugh when asked if there’s any way to define it. “The film is funny, sad, and scary, and you feel a mix of emotions, but I think in the end I want audiences to feel like they have seen an honest portrayal of the times that we currently live in.”

At its heart, the story is about the class divide as illustrated by two families. First, the viewer meets the Kims, a father, mother, and college-age brother and sister who live together in a semi–basement apartment. Bong says he chose this kind of home, not uncommon in his native South Korea, for them because it is realistic, but also because “it really reflects the psyche of the Kim family,” he tells Architectural Digest through a translator. “You’re still half overground, so there’s this hope and this sense that you still have access to sunlight and you haven’t completely fallen to the basement yet. It’s this weird mixture of hope and this fear that you can fall even lower. I think that really corresponds to how the protagonists feel.”

An early rendering of the Kim family’s basement home. Photo: ⓒ 2019 CJ ENM CORPORATION, BARUNSON E&A ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

In order to get it right, production designer Lee Ha Jun visited and photographed empty towns that were set to be torn down, and then copied them as he built the Kim family’s crowded street and cramped, cluttered apartment on a set. “I could see the traces of people who lived there,” he tells AD over email (also via translator) of his visits to the ghost towns. “We even modeled the old bricks used in the empty houses in silicon to re-create them.”