Successful cult films such as The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho’s enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon provides a consideration of the director’s entire career and the themes, ambitions, techniques and preoccupations that infuse his works. As Jeon shows, Bong’s sense of spatial and temporal dislocations creates a hall of mirrors that challenges us to answer the parallel questions Where are we? and When are we? 

Jeon also traces Bong’s oeuvre from its early focus on Korea’s US-fuelled modernisation to examining the entanglements of globalisation in Mother and his subsequent films.

A complete filmography and in-depth interview with the director round out the book. 

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (2012).

University of Illinois Press,176pp, 14cm x 21cm, illustrated paperback, 2024