Most films about class and social hierarchy are filmed to tell you who to root for. Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-Ho, makes it difficult to root for either family in the film. The director spends the first half of the film building the Kim family as desperate, resourceful underdogs you want to root for. Then the second half of the film makes you question whether you should have at all. What begins as a dark comedy about survival and class becomes something more uncomfortable. It pulls back the curtain on the entire system of class conflict and economic disparity in Korea.
The Park house is not only the setting, but also the real subject of the film. Every room, every furniture piece, and every carefully designed decor is meticulously placed, reflecting their wealth that becomes invisible to the people who own it. The Kims painstakingly infiltrate the Park house one by one, by sabotaging the current workers and slipping into those jobs as a driver, housekeeper, tutor, and art therapist. The Parks don’t see them as people at all, people who might have other lives outside of working for them. They blend into the house itself as functions that keep the house running. This carefully sets up to make sure the audience realizes how the class system works.
The film’s most quiet devastating detail that comes up multiple times is smell. Mr. Park, throughout the film, comments on the Kim family’s shared smell without realizing they might be related. It is the one thing the Kims are unable to distance themselves from. They cannot fake it, cannot wash it off, and cannot leave behind, no matter how convincingly they play their parts. Smell stands as a symbol of class in Parasite, something invisible to people at the top but eternally consumed by the people at the bottom. Mr. Kim never brings up how he feels uncomfortable about it. He lets Mr. Park keep talking, and the discomfort persists throughout the movie.
The flooding scene is where the film makes its argument most clearly. While the Parks enjoy the rain from the safety of their mansion as a pleasant backdrop, the Kims come back to the semi-basement apartment to find it flooded with sewage water. It’s the same rain, the same city but two different realities. There is no commentary or music in the background that tells you how to feel. The contrast between the two houses experiencing the same weather is the message that the film has been building towards.
Beneath the dark comedy and the genre shifts, Parasite is a film about desiring something more than the system allows and the associated costs with it. The Kims are clever, capable, and resourceful and in a different situation, it would be good enough to build something real. But in this world, they can only get close to a life they cannot keep. The closer they get to the Park house, the more they abandon their own lives to maintain their act. By the end, they have lost more than they gained.In the end, Parasite offers no solution or comfort. The final image of Ki-woo Kim writing a letter about how one day he will buy the Park house is nothing but a pipe dream, even though he knows it will never come true. The house belongs to someone else, someone not in their social hierarchy. He knows how long it would take. But he writes the letter anyway because he believes it is the only thing he has left. The system always wins. Bong Joon-ho doesn’t end the film with hope because this is not what the film is about. It’s about the distance between being in different classes in a system where it is extremely difficult to advance. And how that distance may never close, even within a full lifetime.
