Parasite
Plot
The Kims - mother and father Chung-sook and Ki-taek, and their young adult offspring, son Ki-woo and daughter Ki-jung - are a poor family living in a shabby and cramped half basement apartment in a busy lower working class commercial district of Seoul. Without even knowing it, they, especially Mr. and Mrs. Kim, literally smell of poverty. Often as a collective, they perpetrate minor scams to get by, and even when they have jobs, they do the minimum work required. Ki-woo is the one who has dreams of getting out of poverty by one day going to university. Despite not having that university education, Ki-woo is chosen by his university student friend Min, who is leaving to go to school, to take over his tutoring job to Park Da-hye, who Min plans to date once he returns to Seoul and she herself is in university. The Parks are a wealthy family who for four years have lived in their modernistic house designed by and the former residence of famed architect Namgoong. While Mr. and Mrs. Park are all about status, Mrs. Park has a flighty, simpleminded mentality and temperament, which Min tells Ki-woo to feel comfortable in lying to her about his education to get the job. In getting the job, Ki-woo further learns that Mrs. Park is looking for an art therapist for the Parks' adolescent son, Da-song, Ki-woo quickly recommending his professional art therapist friend "Jessica", really Ki-jung who he knows can pull off the scam in being the easiest liar of the four Kims. In Ki-woo also falling for Da-hye, he begins to envision himself in that house, and thus the Kims as a collective start a plan for all the Kims, like Ki-jung using assumed names, to replace existing servants in the Parks' employ in orchestrating reasons for them to be fired. The most difficult to get rid of may be Moon-gwang, the Parks' housekeeper who literally came with the house - she Namgoong's housekeeper when he lived there - and thus knows all the little nooks and crannies of it better than the Parks themselves. The question then becomes how far the Kims can take this scam in their quest to become their version of the Parks.
Overall Series Review
Categorical Breakdown
The plot is a direct and forceful lecture on privilege and systemic oppression, substituting class and wealth for race and intersectionality. The wealthy Parks are depicted as incompetent, naive, and fundamentally dependent on the skilled but invisible poor. The film argues against universal meritocracy by showing the talented Kim children cannot succeed without deception, directly attributing their failure to systemic class barriers, not personal lack of merit.
The movie frames modern South Korean society, specifically its neoliberal economic structure, as fundamentally corrupt and incapable of providing stability or justice. The Kim family’s home is literally destroyed by a natural disaster that spares the Parks, framing the home culture’s structure as a mechanism that enables chaos and destruction for the lower class. This is a civilizational self-hatred directed at the nation's prevailing capitalist economic order.
The female leads, Ki-jung and Chung-sook, are portrayed as highly capable, intelligent, and essential strategists within the Kim family’s scheme. They are strong but not perfect 'Girl Bosses,' operating in complementary roles with the men of the family. Mrs. Park, the wealthy matriarch, is depicted as naive and simpleminded. Motherhood is a central feature of both families; it is neither overtly celebrated nor condemned as a 'prison.'
The narrative features no explicit LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or ideological lecturing. The focus is entirely on traditional male-female pairings and the nuclear family unit (Kim and Park), which are presented as the normative structure, whether functional or dysfunctional.
There is no explicit hostility toward religion or specific faiths. The movie is secular, with the characters' motivations being purely material and economic. However, the film embraces a clear moral relativism in that the heinous and deceptive actions of the poor family are portrayed as a justifiable, if tragic, survival strategy against the wealthy's casual cruelty, suggesting that morality is entirely subjective and a consequence of economic 'power dynamics' rather than objective truth.