Parasite

The Architecture of Inequality

It is rare for a film to arrive not merely as a piece of entertainment, but as a diagnostic tool for the collective soul. In 2019, Bong Joon Ho’s *Parasite* did exactly that, shattering the "one-inch barrier" of subtitles to become the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Yet, to view *Parasite* simply as an Oscar winner is to miss its sharper, more uncomfortable truth. It is not a story about heroes and villains, but a spatial tragedy about how we live now—stacked on top of one another, separated by the terrifying verticality of modern capitalism.

Bong has always been a director of distinct sociopolitical appetites, from the bureaucratic incompetence in *The Host* to the rigid class stratification of *Snowpiercer*. But where *Snowpiercer* played out its class warfare on a horizontal train, *Parasite* turns the axis ninety degrees. The film is a masterclass in architectural storytelling. The Kim family lives in a semi-basement (*banjiha*), a purgatorial space where the windows look out onto drunkards urinating on the street. It is a life lived half-underground, fighting for Wi-Fi scraps and sunlight.



Contrast this with the Park family residence—a pristine, modernist fortress of glass and concrete, bathed in the kind of golden sunlight that only wealth can buy. Bong’s camera, guided by cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, moves through this house with a fluid, voyeuristic elegance. The wide aspect ratio captures the vast emptiness of the Park home, a luxury of space that feels almost obscene compared to the Kims' claustrophobic clutter. The visual language is clear: space is not just an asset; it is a moral state.

The brilliance of the narrative lies in its refusal to flatten its characters into caricatures. The wealthy Park family is not evil; they are, as the mother Chung-sook observes, "nice because they are rich." Their kindness is a byproduct of their insulation. They are oblivious, not malicious, which makes their casual cruelty—holding their noses at the "smell" of the subway riders—all the more devastating. The Kims, meanwhile, are not noble savages. They are cunning, ruthless, and desperate, willing to cannibalize their own class (embodied by the former housekeeper) to secure their perch.



The film’s turning point—a deluge of biblical proportions—cements the disparity. For the Parks, the rain is a minor inconvenience that clears the pollution for a garden party. For the Kims, it is a catastrophe that literally floods them with sewage, washing them down the city's topographic hierarchy back to the bottom. The sequence where the family flees the mansion, descending endless flights of stairs into the bowels of Seoul, is a harrowing visual metaphor for the impossibility of upward mobility. Gravity, like the economy, only pulls one way.



Ultimately, *Parasite* is a ghost story without the supernatural. The "ghost" is the repressed underclass, living in the walls, in the basements, and in the subconscious of a society that refuses to look down. Bong Joon Ho offers no easy solutions, no soothing reconciliation. The final shot—a plan for the future that we know, deep down, is a fantasy—leaves us with a lingering, suffocating sadness. It forces us to ask: in a system built on predation, who is truly the parasite?