Going into the movie Parasite, my expectations were somewhat low. Although it won the best picture award at the Oscars last year and was reviewed incredibly, I was unsure I would be able to appreciate a movie while having to read subtitles. Still, despite skepticism, the Korean film surpassed all my expectations.

Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, is set in Seoul, South Korea. The film depicts a poor family, the Kims, scamming an upper-class family, the Parks, living in a luxurious mansion in Seoul. When Ki-woo, the son of the Kim family, is offered a job as an English tutor for Da-Hye Park, the rest of the Kim family manages to acquire jobs as an art therapist, personal driver, and housekeeper by lying about their backgrounds and relationships with each other.

Although the concept felt pretty far-fetched, I found a lot of meaning behind the film. The storyline showed a vast amount of class discrimination that is certainly applicable to the real world. In the movie, the Parks expressed multiple times that they felt the Kims literally smelt of poverty. Although the Kims were guilty of scamming this upper-class family, comments such as these made it much less clear cut who was in fact the true antagonist of the film. In a way, it’s easy to see both sides of the equation. The Kims were of course guilty of dishonesty and deceit, but it’s obvious that the Parks were not entirely in the right either. Although the Kims were, in the end, charged with fraud, the Park family is most definitely guilty of some forms of socioeconomic discrimination.

Beyond my internal dispute about who is truly in the wrong throughout this film, I found the most meaningful portion of the movie to be the ending. It was both very impactful and surprising. Despite the obvious conflicts throughout the movie, I did not expect the ending to be so gruesome. In a way, I think the violent and aggressive nature of the conclusion wrapped up the storyline in a very nice way. I also enjoyed the suspense that the final scene of the movie left the audience with. With the Kim family left separated, the movie concludes with a positive dream of Ki-Woo’s future in which he and his mother are able to reunite with his father who is now wanted for murder. For a moment, it is easy to believe that the story will end in this happy manner, with a reconnected family who was able to escape from poverty, but this is not the true ending. The final scene reveals that the joyful moment was merely an illusion and shows Ki-Woo back in the family’s home with equally poor living conditions as the beginning of the story. It shows that despite all their efforts, the Kim family remains entirely imprisoned by their socioeconomic status.

Although this conclusion was unsettling, I would still highly recommend this movie to others. I found the filming to be very good and the plotline incredibly meaningful.

image: https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/things-to-do-a-review-of-the-movie-parasite-11373314