Who's the Parasite?

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Screenplay: Bong Joon Ho, Jin Won Ho

Cast: Kang Ho Song, Sun Kyun Lee, Yeo Jeong Yo, Woo Sik Choi,So Dam Park

There comes a movie every once a while that makes you sit up in your seat and pay attention to it. Every frame, every placement, every dialogue worthy of your attention. Parasite is one such movie.

Exquisitely crafted by the one and only Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, Okja, Memories of Murder), Parasite is a movie with layers. So today, I’d like to peel away at the onion.

Parasite is the tale of two families from vastly different backgrounds. Kim Ki-woo, played by Choi Woo-sik, and his family live on the edge of poverty. They fold pizza boxes for a living, steal their neighbour's Wifi and leave their windows open when they need a free fumigation. Meanwhile Park Da-hye, played by Jung Ziso, comes from a very rich family. The contrast between the two could not be any more apparent. Park’s house is such an aesthetically pleasing building filled with luxury. Meanwhile Kim lives below ground with a window that is a street level. It’s grimy and they all share one bath room. The events of Parasite are what brings these two families together. Kim’s friend offers him a job as an English tutor for Park, knowing that his family is poor and needs the money. His friend is in love with Park and also trusts Kim not to make a move on her. This is how the two families meet for the first time. But Kim has a much bigger plan. He plans on sneaking his whole family into the household under various pretences.

First he sneaks in his sister as a young arts psychologist who will act as a tutor for Da-song, Park’s younger brother who has a talent for painting. Then Ki Jeong, Kim’s sister, implicates their driver so as to get their father, Kim Ki-Taek into the household as well. Finally the father fools Yeon-kyo (the mother of Da song) that his caretaker has tuberculosis and Moon-gwang, Kim’s mother gets the role of caretaker. These two families, separated by class have come together.

The setup of this film is almost comedic in manner. The way each member of the Park household is implicated will leave the audience chortling, but this is a stark contrast to what the film becomes. There is a dark secret that the Kim family uncovers when the Park family goes away on a camping trip. The previously employed housekeeper comes back to the house, saying she’s forgotten something. She then proceeds to shove a bookshelf aside in the basement and reveals a hidden room underneath the house. Many rich households had built secret bunkers during the period when North and South Korean tensions were very strained. The caretaker hid her husband under there as he was being harassed by loan sharks. He had been living there for the last four years. Moon-gwang has them in the clutch of her hand but things fall apart when the previous care taker realizes that her whole family has cheated everyone of their jobs and been fooling the Park family. What follows is a struggle for dominance between both lower class families. They each try to outplay each other for a very tense twenty minutes as the Parks are coming home from the camping journey. Finally the Kim family prevails and lock the other two in the hidden bunker.

As the family is leaving the house, it begins to rain very heavily. They realize that they left the window open in their house and rush back. Their whole district is flooded. The difference in class is never seen more clearly. How even nature isn’t an equalizing factor when the disparity between social class is too big. Everything in their house is ruined and the whole family has to live in a shelter for the night.. There is a shot in the film that perfectly captures the mood of the whole scenario. Park is sitting on a toilet that’s regurgitating sewer water as she’s smoking a cigarette. Everything has literally gone to shit.

Everything's gone to Shit

One thing to notice here would be the shot composition. The Park’s house is so spacious with plenty of leading lines and light sources to aesthetically light the shot. In addition to that the shots are usually symmetrical to add to the beauty of the household. The camera is also at a straight angle and usually static to give a sense of serenity. Meanwhile in the Kim’s household, the walls confine the shot as well as the family. The roof and the floor can be seen and the low shot angle amplifies that effect.

The Kim family's house

The shot is congested as it tries to show the entire household. The family fills up the shot and there is no depth adding to the feeling of claustrophobia the shot is creating. Everything is messy and the walls are grimy.

The Park family's house

The two characters in the shot create the feeling of depth to the house, portraying that it is indeed massive. The pillar in between beautifully cuts the shot symmetrically and the natural lighting on the right is a nice juxtaposition to the low glow being exuded on the left.

They stay at the shelter overnight but are invited to Da-song’s birthday party the next day. The sky is beautiful and all of the Park’s family friends are invited. They are all members of high society which is clearly indicated from where they meet them and what their occupation is. One of them is an opera singer while she meets some of her friends in a vineyard, all places well out of the Kim family’s reach. They seem out of place there as well. They do not know how to carry themselves in such refined places.

The climax of the film comes during the party itself when the man and caretaker that were locked downstairs escape. When the man escapes he takes a knife and just walks into the party and stabs Ki Jeong. The whole party turns into anarchy. Da Song faints as Kim and his father rush to help Ki Jeong. This is another instance where the difference in social class is exhibited. Yeon-kyo’s husband shouts at them to help his son while Ki Jeong is bleeding to death. The rich do not care about the plights of the poor. A pivotal moment comes when Da song’s father demands Kim to give him the car keys. Hed throws it at him and they land under a dead body. Holding his nose he turns the body over to get the key. Throughout the film he could not bear the stench of Kim ki Taek. The smell of the poor. It’s a beautiful visual symbolism of how the poor are viewed as by the rich. Kim finally snaps and plunges the knife into Mr. Park, killing him. Kim knows there isn’t much time for him and realizes the only place he is safe is in the hidden bunker . He rushes there before the police can reach and closes the door behind him.

The film fast forwards a few months, showing Kim ki woo and his mother mourning the loss of Jeong. Kim ki woo promises his father that he will become rich one day, buy the house and let him out of the bunker, but until then he was trapped. Until then he hopes his father will stay strong. Till the day they can set him free.

Bong Joon Ho has done many social critiques and examinations of society in movies such as Snowpiercer and Okja, but personally for me this one feels the most authentic. The gradual build up of events and the portrayal of the different worlds that each family comes from makes for great viewing. At every twist, I’m sure the whole narrative is going to unravel but Bong Joon keeps it tight and delivers a haunting end that is sure to stay with the viewer and make him ask may questions.

One of them being, can the poor simply walk into the lives of the rich? In the beginning of the movie, the narrative almost seems satirical in nature, but then as events unfold one realizes the price of walking into a world where you don’t belong.

While the work is a complete piece of fiction, it does portray the very rigid social class structure prevalent in South Korea. Kim’s family has to prove that they are valuable to the Park family and even then they are just seen as utensils. Their feelings are not considered. They are told to never cross the line. The line that distinguishes who’s in control. One narrative trick employed is how Mr. Park always complains about Kim ki Taek’s smell. It’s the smell of poverty. Of fungus covered walls and free fumigation. A smell that cannot be washed away. It is that smell that eventually kills Mr. Park.

The colours used in the film tended more towards the natural side. Most of the work was done by the artificial lighting. By using this kind of colour grading, it tends to make the film look as realistic as possible without losing visual clarity of the shot. In the hidden bunker however, light sources give off a green hue, making those scenes much more scarier. It also shows a clear disparity between the rich and the poor or the upstairs and downstairs setup. The rich do not care about what happens downstairs or about what happens to the poor. The lighting reflects the mood of each part of society. The poor have to deal with these issues while for the rich everything is rosy coloured.

Green Hues of the Bunker

Lighting Upstairs (Bright Hues)

The camera stays very close to the actor’s faces so as to clearly capture the nuances in acting. After all, the Kim family is trying to fool the Park family into believing they are someone they are not. If they cannot fool the audience, they cannot fool the Park family. In addition to this many symmetric shots are used to bring out the clean aesthetic of the Park household as well as to focus on the centre of the shot. One shot where that works to great effect is when the man hiding in the basement escapes one day and Da song mistakes him for a ghost. The simplicity of the shot means that the audience is not distracted by anything else and focusses at the centre, where the face appears.

Focus at the Centre

Moving on to the dichotomies present in the film, there is clearly a contrast in ideologies about what it means to be poor and rich. There is a class dichotomy that permeates throughout society and that is represented here by the two families. The Kim family that siphons free wifi and the Park family, who believe they are entitled to the best of everything. The situational context that each family lives on clearly defines the difference in class and how it creates a wedge that is very hard to remove. The world of the rich is very different from the world of the poor and neither of them really know how the other one works which is what creates the dichotomy.

Since the movie is in Korean, picking up verbal cues and different dialects is difficult. But the director has made visible effort to portray their language difference through the difference in character that each member of the Kim family plays in the Park household. Jeong goes from a sassy laid back girl to a strict and formidable arts professor that commanded the respect of Yeon kyo the moment she entered the house. Kim ki woo turns from a shy and lonesome boy to a confident english tutor despite him not having any university education. Kim’s father becomes a thoroughly professional driver and a smooth talker compared to the crass talk he usually does with his family. Their body language at their own home and at the Park household is completely different. For a moment, they believe they can actually fit in and hence the audience also believes it.

But then Bong Joon ho brings us crashing back to reality. Parasite almost seems like two different films. One a satirical comedy and the other a psychological thriller. But one is merely a facade that hides the other. The director reels the audience in and then slaps them in the face by showing them the grim reality of today’s society. And while it is one that we may not want to accept, it is one that is inevitable. So it makes me wonder, who is the actual parasite? Is it the poor that try to live of the wealth and luxury of the rich? Or is it the rich who use the poor as mere instruments which are then thrown away when not useful to them. Or is it us? The people who watch these films realizing the class disparity among ourselves and yet do nothing? It is a question I still don’t have an answer to.

And I’m not sure whether I want to find out.