The Strand Reviews Parasite

Bong Joon Ho’s new film is a beautiful, tragic, and hilarious exploration of the class struggle

From the very beginning of Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s most recent movie, space is of utmost importance. The movie opens on the desolate Kim family and their semi-basement apartment. Right away, Bong establishes the status of the Kim family—half above ground, half below. This stands in contrast to the house of the wealthy Park family, a giant modernist mansion that looks out onto a beautiful green lawn.  

Bong’s film follows the exploits of the Kim family as they slowly infiltrate the Park family. First, the son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) gets a job as an English tutor for the Parks’ daughter. Then, his sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) becomes a bougie art therapist for the Parks’ son. Finally, the Kim patriarch and matriarch, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) and Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin), become the Parks’ driver and housekeeper, respectively. The first half of the movie goes by easily—almost too easily. The Kim family is able to finagle their way into the Parks’ lives and trust without too much effort. In fact, their exploits are fun to watch, light-hearted, and comedic.  

Halfway through the film, the secret of the beautiful Park mansion is found out, and the titular parasite exposes itself. This is a major spoiler alert, but there is no way to talk about Parasite without talking about, well, the parasite. It turns out there is a family lower than the Kims: in the basement of the Park mansion lives another family. The former housekeeper has been hiding her husband in the basement after fleeing loan sharks. Bong uses space and architectural levels to show the status of characters, both visually and literally. From the Parks’ cloistered lives in their walled-off mansion, to the semi-public half-basement that the Kims live in, to the literal bunker that the old housekeeper’s husband is in, the spaces that the characters inhabit dictate the lives they live.  

The parasite in Parasite is not this subterranean couple. Rather, it’s the parasitic relationship that exists between the classes. The Parks, a young nouveau-riche couple who have found wealth in the tech sector, depend on the lower classes for everything. It’s how the Kims are able to infiltrate the entire family; a string of recommendations from son to daughter to father to mother that the Parks blindly rely on allows the Kims to sneak right up to the Parks without them even noticing.  

Bong doesn’t let the lower classes off easy, however. Though it’s obvious that the rich rely on the labour of the poor, it’s a two-way street in Parasite. The Kims rely on the Parks for income, stability, and the Kims all hope to one day live in a house like the Parks’.  

Though it’s true that the Parks did nothing wrong, their fatal flaw was trusting the wrong people, and the tragedy of Parasite is that the poor don’t band together to fight the rich. Instead, the two families, the one in the bunker and the one in the sub-basement, decide to fight each other. The fight between these two lower-class families is what ultimately drives the film towards a chaotic and violent end. The Parks, however, get out of the film relatively unscathed; the rich coming out on top as the poor fight amongst each other. The rich will always live in their walled-in mansions while the poor fight between the basement and the sub-basement.