Who’s the parasite?

Bong Joon-ho’s magnificent genre-bending movie Parasite is a funny, deeply satirical look at class divisions, told through the intersecting lives of three families in Seoul, South Korea. It morphs into a psychological thriller that plays with various meanings of the title and exposes the secrets and lies of a society marked by radical economic inequality.

The Kim family—father, mother, and young adult son and daughter—share a tiny, squalid semi-basement apartment in one of Seoul’s many overcrowded back allies that make up a labyrinthine network of poverty and desperation. We meet the family pirating the last remaining free wireless signal—accessible only in the toilet—and clumsily assembling cardboard boxes for a local pizza chain for pennies a box. They embody the precarity of life in the globalized gig economy. But they refuse to see their steady decline into deeper poverty as inevitable, always hoping the next gig will reverse their fortunes.

Their hopes seem to come true when the son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), lands a job as an English tutor for the wealthy Park family. The Parks live, literally and figuratively, above the slums in a house that resembles a bubble of glass, air, and light. Ki-woo’s amazement at their re­finement and luxury quickly moves into savvy schemes about how to enrich his family. Like a team orchestrating an elaborate heist, the Kims quickly infiltrate the Park family, making themselves indispensable in a range of service jobs.