Parasite is a merciless diagnosis of the class system. Its protagonists’ deepest wish is not to destroy that system. It is to be on the right side of it.
Here is the scene the film moves past most quickly. In the subterranean bunker beneath the Park family’s architect-designed mansion, a man named Geun-se has been living for four years. He has survived by eating the Parks’ food, sleeping in the Parks’ dark, emerging into the house only when no one is there. He has no income, no status, no recourse. He is the lowest point in a film about vertical social stratification, the bottom beneath the bottom. And in that bunker, on the wall, he has built a shrine. At the top of it: a photograph of Mr. Park, the wealthy patriarch who owns the house. Geun-se does not know Mr. Park. Mr. Park does not know Geun-se exists. Geun-se worships him anyway. Every morning, Geun-se flips the light switches in the bunker to turn on the Parks’ outdoor lights, a small act of devotion to a man who thinks the lights are on a sensor. He is grateful to be allowed to survive in the basement of someone else’s wealth.
The Kims never really look at this. And neither, quite, does the film.
Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho and winner of both the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2019 and 2020 respectively, is one of the most precisely constructed and cinematically thrilling films of the twenty-first century. It follows the Kim family — father Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), mother Chung-sook, daughter Ki-jung, son Ki-woo — who live in a bug-infested semi-basement apartment in Seoul, struggling to cover their bills folding pizza boxes. Through a series of cons of increasing audacity, they infiltrate the household of the wealthy Parks, each family member securing a position: Ki-woo as English tutor, Ki-jung as art therapist, Ki-taek as chauffeur, Chung-sook as housekeeper. The first half of the film is a heist comedy of genuine brilliance, shot through with the pleasurable tension of watching a family whose collective intelligence and improvisation are a joy to spend time with. We root for the Kims. The film is designed to make us root for the Kims.
Then Moon-gwang, the housekeeper the Kims displaced, returns one night while the Parks are away — and the film turns into something else entirely.
| Director | Bong Joon-ho |
|---|---|
| Year | 2019 |
| Runtime | 132 minutes |
| Cast | Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Jang Hye-jin, Park Myeong-hoon, Lee Jung-eun |
| Awards | Palme d’Or, Cannes 2019; Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film |
| Streaming | Max, Mubi |
The genre shift that the film performs at this moment — from heist comedy to horror — is usually discussed as Bong’s technical virtuosity at work, his ability to pivot tonal registers without seams. It is that. It is also something else: a confession. The horror arrives precisely when the Kims are forced to confront the existence of Geun-se and Moon-gwang, two people in a situation worse than their own, two people who are, structurally, their class peers. And the Kims’ response is immediate and uncomplicatedly self-interested: contain the threat, protect the scheme. Moon-gwang begs not to be exposed. The Kims tie her up in the basement. When she hits her head in the struggle, they leave her there. She does not survive it. The film stages this and keeps moving, because it has a genre machinery to run.
“A film about what the class system does to the poor cannot fully look at what the Kims do to Geun-se and Moon-gwang, because looking would mean asking whether the Kims are victims of the system or also its agents. The answer is both, and the film cannot hold both at once.”
What Parasite withholds is any sustained reckoning with the Kims’ aspiration. They are not trying to dismantle the Parks’ world. They are trying to live in it. The entire first act — the forgeries, the networking, the social performance — is directed toward a single goal: getting paid as much as the Parks pay. The semi-basement they come from is depicted as misery, and it is. But the answer the Kims reach for is not a different system; it is a better position within the existing one. Ki-woo, in the film’s final sequence, narrates his plan with a kind of aching optimism: he will study, earn enough money, buy the Parks’ house, and free his father from the bunker where Ki-taek has taken Geun-se’s place. The film frames this as poignant and probably impossible, the cycle of poverty clamping shut around another generation. What it does not notice is the content of Ki-woo’s dream. He wants to become a Park. He wants the house on the hill, the architect’s design, the clean air. The structural problem that created the Kims has no place in his imagining of the future.
The scholar’s rock that Ki-woo carries throughout the film — a gift from a friend, meant to bring material luck — becomes a weapon twice: first when Geun-se uses it to bludgeon Ki-woo, then when Ki-woo returns it to the garden at the end. Bong has said the rock tells the whole story, this cursed object that ends up covered in blood. The poor use it on each other. It never touches the wealthy. The film sees this clearly, names it in its imagery, and then settles for elegy rather than asking the question the image raises: why, in a film about class, does the violence always run horizontally — poor against poor — rather than up?
The film to place alongside it is Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018), made the year before and winner of that year’s Palme d’Or. It shares almost every surface feature with Parasite: a makeshift family on the margins of the Japanese economy, surviving through petty crime, loving each other in a crowded low-income home, eventually destroyed by a system that neither acknowledges nor accommodates them. But the Shibata family of Shoplifters never looks up the hill with longing. They do not aspire toward the world that excludes them. Their economy is horizontal — things shoplifted from stores, small cons, a grandmother’s pension — and their bonds are with each other rather than with the dream of ascent. When the system takes the family apart, it feels like devastation because something real is lost. When Parasite ends with Ki-woo dreaming of buying the Parks’ house, it feels like something different: a boy who has learned nothing about the shape of his own desire, reaching for the same image of the good life that the system has always sold him.
Parasite is a masterwork of cinema — its architecture, its performances, its control of genre and tone, its ability to make a hundred-and-thirty-minute thriller feel as tight as a fist. It diagnoses the class system with extraordinary precision. It knows what poverty does to people: the inventiveness, the humor, the constant performance of competence in spaces that were not designed for you. It knows what wealth does to people: the obliviousness, the sensitivity to smell, the ease of those who have never had to think about how they appear. It is one of the most intelligent films made about money in recent decades.
It does not know that its heroes want to be rich. It thinks they want to be free. These are not the same thing, and the difference between them is the argument the film is standing right next to without quite stepping into.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018): the film that shows the path Parasite doesn’t take — a family on the same social margins whose aspirations run inward rather than up, and whose destruction by the system feels like genuine loss because they never wanted to join it.
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013): Bong’s earlier class allegory, in which the lower-class protagonist actually reaches the front of the train and faces the question Parasite never arrives at: when you finally get there, what do you do with it?
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