By Maximillian Beale (Rochester, New York)
The 2019 South Korean Thriller, Parasite, is a movie about class discrimination and poverty. I will try not to spoil the essential parts of the movie, but I can’t guarantee that, so read at your own risk. The film begins by introducing the Kim family and their social status. You can tell just how poor the Kim family is. The film does a great job telling us everything we need to know about the family in the first few minutes. As the two children, Ki-woo and Ki-jung, try to find free Wi-Fi, we see their poor living conditions in a tiny basement apartment. We are also introduced to the entire Kim family and begin to grasp who they are. In the proceeding scene, Chung-sook, the mother, accepts a one-off job folding pizza boxes we start to see just how cunning and desperate the family really is.
The next part of the film is overall pretty light-hearted, as the brilliance and finesse of the family are put on full display. It all starts with Min, Ki-woo’s childhood friend, offering him a tutoring job for a wealthy family. Hope begins to manifest in the Kim family, and a plan is set in motion. One by one, each family member manages to get a job working for the wealthy Park family. This process involves convincing the rather gullible and oblivious Park family that someone should be hired for each position, all the time pretending to only be familiar with the potential employee. They pull off a clever sequence getting the maid fired and the mother hired in her stead. And so begins the rise of the Kim family.
However, everything turns sour on one fateful night. With the Park family out camping, the Kim family decides to form a celebration of their newfound success in the Park family home. Without spoiling too much, the fired maid shows up and demands to see something. What follows is a bizarre and unsettling disclosure, which marks the turning point in the movie. The film takes on a much darker tone and will only get darker.
The Kim family is forced to retreat to their apartment, only to discover that it has flooded from heavy rain. This highlights the despair and fall from grace of the Kim family, as they are forced to leave the upscale part of the city and move to the impoverished region. The family has even less than what they started with, making them even more desperate. Overall, this is a brilliant scene. The Kim family manages to retrieve a couple of possessions and are forced to spend the night in a local homeless shelter. Hope is all but lost for Ki-taek, the father, but Ki-woo still holds firm to his beliefs. This belief will ultimately cloud his mind and lead to his family’s downfall.
It is hard to reveal what happens next without spoiling it. Basically, the film builds to its very intense crescendo involving all three parties previously introduced in the movie. The fallout from the grand finale leaves Ki-woo hospitalized and forces Ki-taek into hiding. The film concludes with Ki-woo planning to rescue the father from his predicament. The final scene mirrors the opening scene, with Ki-woo being back to square one, but it is much darker this time.
To understand the ending, one must circle back to the film’s title, Parasite. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a parasite is “an organism living in, on, or with another organism in order to obtain nutrients, grow, or multiply often in a state that directly or indirectly harms the host.” The Kim family’s actions match this definition, almost word for word, making them the parasite. But what about the other family who was living off the Park family? While it could be argued they are also parasites, their actions don’t quite capture the definition in the same way the Kim family does. If we view the Park family as a host, the parasite is introduced into their system with Ki-woo. Then the parasite multiplies as each family member enters the fold. The Kim family lives off of the Park family and, at first, indirectly harms the host. Ki-woo and Ki-jung, aren’t really qualified to be tutors, especially Ki-woo. Then, as you will see in the finale, the Kim family directly harms the Park family. This film is a modern-day masterpiece, well deserving of all the awards and praise it has received.
Rating: 5/5