Parasite

The Kim family survives in a cramped semi-basement flat in Seoul on whatever work they can find: folding pizza boxes for pennies, catching a neighbour's wifi through the bathroom window when their own gets cut off. Father Ki-taek, mother Chung-sook, and their grown children Ki-woo and Ki-jung are clever, capable, and completely stuck — no money, no connections, and, it seems, no way up.

Then Ki-woo's old friend Min-hyuk, heading abroad to study, hands him an opportunity: a well-paid job tutoring English for a wealthy family, the Parks, whose teenage daughter Da-hye he has been teaching. Ki-woo has never actually been to university, but his sister Ki-jung forges a diploma with expert precision, and "Kevin" — poised, confident, entirely invented — walks into the Parks' immaculate, architect-designed house and is hired on the spot by the trusting, easily-impressed mother, Yeon-kyo.

It is only the beginning. Ki-woo notices the Parks' young son, Da-song, is a handful, and recommends an "art therapist" he happens to know — unrelated, of course: his own sister, now "Jessica." One by one, with forged papers, plausible lies and a staged allergy that gets the loyal housekeeper Moon-gwang fired, all four Kims talk, scheme and forge their way into jobs inside the same house — driver, housekeeper, tutor, therapist — without either Park parent ever suspecting their new staff are one family.

With the Parks away on a camping trip, the Kims take over the empty house for a night, drinking the family's whisky and imagining, just for a few hours, what it would feel like to actually own it all. The illusion doesn't last. Late at night, the doorbell rings: it's Moon-gwang, the housekeeper they had schemed to get fired, asking to come in and collect something she left behind.

What she left behind is her husband, Geun-sae — hiding, for years, in a secret bunker built beneath the house by its original architect as a shelter from the North, unknown even to the Parks. He has been living there in total secrecy, fed scraps by his wife, hiding from debt collectors who would otherwise ruin him. When Moon-gwang realises the Kims are a family running the very same kind of con she has feared being exposed for herself, a desperate standoff turns violent — just as the Parks call to say the rain has cancelled their trip and they are coming home within the hour.

What follows is chaos: the Kims scramble to erase every trace of themselves from the house, lock the wounded Moon-gwang and her husband in the bunker, and stumble home through a torrential, city-drowning storm — only to find their own semi-basement flooded to the ceiling with sewage, their whole home wrecked in a single night.

The next day, as if nothing happened, the Parks throw a lavish garden party for Da-song's birthday — sunshine, a marquee, wealthy guests — while, across the city, the Kims' home is still full of filthy floodwater. The contrast the film has been building all along finally breaks open in public.

During the party, Geun-sae — deranged after his ordeal in the bunker — breaks free, grabs a kitchen knife, and attacks the Kim family in front of the horrified guests, fatally stabbing Ki-jung. In the panic that follows, Chung-sook kills Geun-sae. But it is a smaller, quieter gesture that detonates the film's real point: as Park patriarch Dong-ik crouches over the dying Geun-sae to grab a set of car keys, he flinches and pinches his nose at the smell — the very same "smell" he has quietly complained about regarding his own driver, Ki-taek, throughout the film, a smell money can wash off and poverty, apparently, cannot. Something in Ki-taek breaks. He picks up the knife and kills Dong-ik.

Ki-taek disappears — and, in the film's final twist, he is revealed to be living out the rest of his life exactly where Geun-sae once did: in the secret bunker beneath the house, now occupied by a different, oblivious wealthy family. Ki-woo, recovering from a head injury, writes his father a letter describing a plan: he will study, get rich, and buy the house himself, to legally free his father one day. The film's closing shot pulls us straight back to the cramped, sunken semi-basement flat where it all began — the plan, we understand, is a beautiful, almost impossible dream.

The Kims' cramped flat is a banjiha — a real category of South Korean housing, found by the hundreds of thousands, especially in Seoul. Banjiha weren't originally built as homes at all: in the 1970s, with tension high between North and South Korea, the government required new low-rise buildings to include a basement that could double as a bomb shelter. As Seoul's population exploded and housing grew scarce, landlords began illegally renting these spaces out; the government finally legalised them for living in 1984. Cheap, often damp, dimly lit and set half below street level, they remain one of the cheapest ways to live in one of the world's most expensive cities — home to roughly 2% of South Korean households, the vast majority of them in Seoul.

The film's own storm turned out to be tragically prophetic. In August 2022, record rainfall flooded Seoul; at least eleven people died in the city, and three of them — two sisters and a young relative — drowned inside a single banjiha flat when the floodwater rose faster than they could escape. Seoul's city government responded by banning new banjiha construction and announcing a twenty-year plan to phase out existing ones. The film wasn't exaggerating the danger; if anything, it anticipated it.

The gap the film dramatises has its own name in Korean popular culture: sujeo gyegeullon, or "spoon class theory." Since around 2015, young South Koreans have used it to describe how a person's life chances are largely set at birth — a "gold spoon" if born into wealth, a "dirt spoon" if not — regardless of effort or ability, a frustration that sharpened after South Korea's tough late-1990s economic crisis and a growing sense that upward mobility had quietly closed off.

One detail the film returns to again and again — the "smell" the Parks notice on their driver, and later on the whole Kim family — was entirely deliberate. Director Bong Joon-ho has explained that "the only time those of different classes can smell each other is when the poor work for the rich families as tutors, housekeepers and drivers," adding that using smell let the film explore class "in a more delicate and multi-layered manner" than showing poverty and wealth side by side ever could. It's a smell soap can't remove, because it isn't really about hygiene at all — it's about a life lived in a small, damp, underground room.