Parasite

I watched Parasite in a cinema without reading a review, which is increasingly difficult to achieve with a film everyone is discussing.

For the first half hour I thought I knew what kind of story I was watching. Then someone rang a doorbell.

After that, classification became useless.

Comedy darkened into suspense, suspense acquired the shape of horror, and horror eventually revealed something sadder underneath. Yet through every shift the film kept returning to the same material fact: where people live.

The Kim family occupies a semi-basement. Their window is close to the pavement, low enough to collect drunk passersby, dust, fumigation and the legs of people whose lives take place above them. The Park house sits high behind walls, glass and carefully designed space.

The difference between the families is explained architecturally before it is explained economically.

You move between them through stairs.

That is what I noticed when I left the cinema. The parking garage had a long concrete staircase, and for the first time that evening the ordinary act of climbing felt like commentary.

The rain sequence is the film’s argument in miniature. For the Parks, the storm clears the air and leaves the garden beautiful. For the Kims, the same rain turns home into sewage.

Same weather.

Not the same event.

We often describe large events as though they happen equally to everyone. Recession, inflation, a storm, an epidemic, a power cut. The noun is shared; the capacity to absorb it is not.

This is where Parasite avoids an easier moral structure. The poor family is not made automatically virtuous, nor the rich family automatically monstrous. The Kims lie, manipulate and hurt people. The Parks can be pleasant, even generous, inside the terms of their world.

The problem is larger than niceness.

Mr. Park’s obsession with the “line” reveals this. Class is not announced as ideology. It appears in discomfort, distance, smell and assumptions about who may become familiar. He does not need to wake each morning deciding to humiliate anyone. The hierarchy already exists in the arrangement of space.

The word smell becomes particularly cruel because it follows the body across disguise. Clothes can change. Speech can be rehearsed. Qualifications can be forged. The body still carries evidence of where it sleeps.

A few weeks after seeing the film, I visited an apartment for rent. The advertisement had described it as “garden level.” The window looked directly at the tires of parked cars.

I thought of the Kim home and laughed, then felt bad for laughing.

Language, too, has architecture.

A basement can become garden level if the person selling it controls the description.

By the end of Parasite, the house has revealed spaces even its owners barely know. That feels like the film’s final insult to the fantasy that wealth provides complete knowledge of the world one owns.

Somebody may be beneath you.

Not metaphorically.

Actually beneath you.

The genius of the film is that, after two hours, a staircase is no longer merely a staircase.