Parasite Movie: A Study of Class, Fate, and the Illusion of Control
Editor’s Note: Parasite isn't just a thriller; it's a mirror. In this article, aspiring director Praveen Kumar moves beyond the plot to dissect the film's architecture, its commentary on class, and the terrifying realization that…rich or poor, none of us are truly in control. SPOILER ALERT: YES, this article contains major spoilers for the ending of Parasite. If you haven't seen it, you’ve been warned.
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About the Film
Title: Parasite (기생충)
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Screenplay: Bong Joon-ho & Han Jin-won
Year: 2019
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean
Runtime: 132 minutes
Genre: Dark Comedy / Thriller / Drama
Studio: CJ Entertainment
U.S. Distributor: Neon
Cast:
Song Kang-ho as Kim Ki-taek
Choi Woo-shik as Kim Ki-woo
Park So-dam as Kim Ki-jung
Jang Hye-jin as Chung-sook
Lee Sun-kyun as Park Dong-ik
Cho Yeo-jeong as Yeon-kyo
Lee Jung-eun as Moon-gwang
Rotten Tomatoes: 99% Critics / 90% Audience
Metacritic: 96/100
IMDb: 8.5/10
Awards and Accolades
Few films in history have swept the awards season the way Parasite did. Here are the highlights:
Academy Awards (Oscars) 2020
Best Picture (first non-English language film to win in the Academy's 92-year history)
Best Director – Bong Joon-ho (only the second non-English language director to win, after Alfonso Cuarón for Roma)
Best Original Screenplay – Bong Joon-ho & Han Jin-won
Best International Feature Film
Nominated: Best Film Editing, Best Production Design
Cannes Film Festival 2019
Palme d'Or (first Korean film to win; first unanimous Palme d'Or vote since Blue Is the Warmest Colour in 2013)
Golden Globe Awards 2020
Best Motion Picture – Foreign Language Film
Nominated: Best Director, Best Screenplay
BAFTA Awards 2020
Best Original Screenplay
Best Film Not in the English Language
Screen Actors Guild Awards 2020
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture (first foreign language film to win the top SAG honor)
Additional Recognition
Sydney Film Prize
South Korea's Grand Bell Award for Best Film
César Award for Best Foreign Film
Independent Spirit Award for Best International Film
59 total awards across 58 film festivals and award-giving bodies worldwide
Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020, the first non-English language film to do so. That alone would make it historically significant. But the reason it deserved that award goes deeper than the achievement. This is a film that gets inside you and stays there, asking questions long after the credits roll.
Let’s take a long pause and breathe before stepping into this world. Because watching Parasite is not just watching a film. It feels like sitting quietly after something has shaken you from the inside. It stays. It lingers. It questions you.
After watching Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), I didn’t feel like I had finished a movie. Instead, I felt like the movie had finished something inside me — maybe my assumptions about success, morality, and control over life. This is not simply a story about rich and poor. It is a layered meditation on human survival.
From the first frame to the last, the storytelling is precise and almost surgical. Nothing is wasted. Every object, every staircase, every smell, every drop of rain means something. The drama is impeccable, supported by deeply human performances from the cast — Song Kang-ho as Kim Ki-taek (father), Jang Hye-jin as Chung-sook (mother), Choi Woo-shik as Ki-woo (son), Park So-dam as Ki-jung (daughter), Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong as the wealthy Park couple, and Lee Jung-eun as the former housekeeper Moon-gwang. Even the minor characters feel necessary, like pieces of a chessboard.
It is rare for a film to feel so perfectly assembled.
The Opening: Poverty Without Drama
What struck me first was the simplicity of the beginning.
No background music forcing emotion. No exaggerated suffering. Just a semi-basement house, low windows, drunk men peeing outside, and a family folding pizza boxes for money. This is poverty presented without cinematic decoration.
One small but important detail is Chung-sook’s past. She was a hammer throw champion. She even has a certificate. That small prop says so much. Talent existed. Hard work existed. But opportunity didn’t. The system did not reward her. Society quietly discarded her.
This tells us something powerful: poverty is not always the result of laziness. Sometimes it is simply structural neglect.
The Kim family is not incompetent. They are smart, adaptive, and skilled. Yet they are stuck.
And this is where Parasite begins asking its first question: If talent is not enough, what really determines success?
The Plan: Human Ego and the Illusion of Control
The Kims create a meticulous plan to infiltrate the Park family’s house. One by one, they replace the driver, the housekeeper, the tutor, and the art therapist. It is clever, almost funny. For a while, we feel proud of them. It feels like a heist film.
There's a line in the film that stayed with me long after it ended. Ki-taek says: "You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan at all."
It sounds like nihilism. It isn't. It's exhaustion. It's the broken wisdom of someone who has tried too many times and failed too many times. The Kims plan because they have to. Survival demands strategy. But the universe keeps reminding them they're not in control. The hidden basement exists. The old housekeeper returns. The rain comes. The smell exposes them. Every uncontrollable force dismantles their perfect strategy. That's where the tragedy lives.
Architecture as Class Division
One of the most genius aspects of Parasite is how class is shown visually, not through speeches. The Park house is modern, clean, open, and elevated. Sunlight enters freely. Everything is horizontal and spacious. The Kim house is underground, cramped, and damp. Even the toilet is raised awkwardly. They literally live below street level.
The film constantly uses stairs.
Upstairs → wealth
Downstairs → poverty
Whenever the Kims go to work, they climb up. Whenever they return home, they descend.
This is not accidental. Bong Joon-ho turns architecture into social commentary. Class is not just money. It is geography. Where you live physically becomes where you stand socially.
The Rain: Beauty for Some, Disaster for Others
One of the most heartbreaking sequences is the rainstorm.
For the Park family, rain is romantic. It clears the air. It creates a beautiful camping mood for their son. They wake up happy and refreshed.
For the Kim family, that same rain floods their entire home. Sewage water overflows. Their belongings float away. Everything they own is destroyed.
Same rain. Two different realities. This scene perfectly captures inequality. Nature itself becomes political. The rich experience inconvenience. The poor experience catastrophe.
It quietly says: comfort depends on distance from suffering. If you are rich enough, disasters look aesthetic.
The Smell: The Invisible Border
Perhaps the most painful motif in the film is “the smell.”
The Parks repeatedly mention the smell of the Kims — a subway smell, a basement smell.
This is devastating because smell is something you cannot hide easily. Clothes can change. Language can change. But smell? It betrays you.
It becomes a biological marker of class. No matter how well the Kims perform, they can never truly belong. There is always an invisible border. And that border finally breaks Ki-taek’s dignity during the climax.
When Mr. Park holds his nose in disgust while Ki-taek is grieving his injured daughter, something snaps inside him. That murder is not planned. It is not strategic. It is pure humiliation exploding. In that moment, Ki-taek is not killing a man.
He is killing years of silent disrespect.
Who Is the Parasite?
The title itself is genius.
At first, we think the Kims are parasites — living off the rich family. But slowly the question flips.
The Parks cannot cook, clean, drive, or manage their lives without workers. They depend entirely on labor from the lower class.
So who is the parasite? Maybe both. Maybe society itself is parasitic.
The rich feed on cheap labor. The poor feed on opportunities created by the rich. Neither exists independently.
Even Moon-gwang and her husband parasitize the Parks secretly in the basement. It is layers of dependence.
A cycle with no clear villain. That’s what makes the film uncomfortable.
It refuses to give us a hero.
The Ending: Hope or Illusion?
The final scene shows Ki-woo dreaming of earning money and buying the house to free his father.
At first, it feels hopeful. But then reality returns. We see him still in the same semi-basement. The plan is just a dream.
And we understand something tragic: For people trapped in structural poverty, even hope becomes fantasy.
The system doesn’t change just because you wish harder. This ending doesn’t offer victory.
Everyone loses.
The sister dies.
The father hides underground.
The son lives with guilt.
The Parks lose their comfort.
No one wins. Which makes the film feel painfully real.
Parasite and the Larger Korean Cinema Moment
Parasite didn't arrive in a vacuum. For years before that Best Picture win, Korean cinema had been quietly building a Western audience through films that operated in ways Hollywood rarely attempted: morally ambiguous, tonally unpredictable, and willing to go to places American studios wouldn't greenlight. We've written here about how the J-horror wave of the early 2000s first opened Western eyes to Asian cinema, and Parasite was in many ways the culmination of that long slow process of discovery. The audience was finally ready because decades of Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon, and Bong himself had prepared them.
The Best Picture win wasn't a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention. It was an inevitability that just took a while to arrive.
What Parasite Left Behind
After Parasite, I didn't feel entertained. I felt exposed.
It forced uncomfortable questions that don't have clean answers. Is success really merit-based? Are we truly in control of anything? Is morality even possible when survival is the priority?
The film doesn't answer these. It just holds them up and makes you look.
The smell. The stairs. The rain. The basement. Bong Joon-ho built a film out of details so precise that none of them feel like metaphor while you're watching. They feel like life. Then you step back and realize the whole thing is a metaphor, perfectly assembled, and you've been living inside it for two hours without noticing.
That's the mirror. And mirrors, as anyone who's looked honestly into one knows, are not always comfortable things.
Bong Joon-ho's Larger Body of Work
If Parasite is your entry point into Bong Joon-ho's filmmaking, it's worth knowing it didn't come from nowhere. His 2003 film Memories of Murder, a procedural about South Korea's first serial murder case, is as tense and morally complex as anything he's made. The Host (2006) is a monster movie that's really about governmental incompetence and family grief. Snowpiercer (2013) takes the class warfare of Parasite and puts it on a train hurtling through a frozen apocalypse.
Each film uses genre as a Trojan horse for something more uncomfortable. Parasite is the most refined version of that method, but the instinct runs through everything he's made.
Bio:
Praveen Kumar is amovie lover and one day aspires to become a Movie Director. He’s also founder of HuntingForKicks.com.
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