When a film like Parasite bursts onto the world stage, winning top honors and capturing the global imagination, it does more than just entertain. It holds up a mirror. Despite cultural specifics, its story resonated because it speaks a universal language about the invisible structures that govern our lives. The plot feels deceptively simple at first: the down-on-their-luck Kim family cleverly infiltrates the lives of the wealthy Park family, one by one, securing jobs as their tutors, driver, and housekeeper. But this brilliant setup is just the first step down a dark, winding staircase where biting irony gives way to gut-wrenching tragedy, leaving us with the unsettling feeling that, in the end, nothing really changes.

The film’s power lies in how it forces us to confront the uncomfortable truths of social hierarchy, not as an abstract concept, but as a lived, physical reality.

The Architecture of Inequality

Director Bong Joon-ho is a master of visual storytelling, and in Parasite, space is destiny. The wealthy Parks live in a pristine, architectural marvel high on a hill, bathed in sunlight. The Kims, by contrast, inhabit a cramped semi-basement apartment at the bottom of the city, a space so low that it's regularly flooded with sewage during a storm. This vertical hierarchy is stark and deliberate.

It’s a theme the director has explored before. In his dystopian film Snowpiercer, society was also divided, but horizontally along the length of a train: the elite occupied the luxurious front cars while the oppressed festered in the tail. In Parasite, the division is vertical, a ladder that everyone is desperately trying to climb. The conflict that arises is not between two families but between two worlds, co-dependent yet separated by an invisible, insurmountable wall.

The Dream of Becoming the Master

The film brilliantly sidesteps a simple tale of the oppressed rising against their oppressors. The Kims have no interest in tearing down the system; they want to conquer it. This taps into a profound philosophical idea, best articulated by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in his "master-slave dialectic."

For Hegel, society is formed by this fundamental relationship. The Master is defined by consumption and leisure, producing nothing. The Slave, however, is forced to work, to shape the world and create things. In this act of creation, the Slave develops skills, consciousness, and a sense of self that the idle Master lacks. The Slave doesn’t just dream of freedom; they dream of having slaves of their own.

We see this perfectly in Parasite. The Kims are the active, creative force, masterfully manipulating their way into the Park household. The Parks, in contrast, are passive and helpless consumers, unable to perform basic tasks without assistance. Through their labor and cunning, the Kims become a real force, yet their goal is simply to take the Master's place. This insight was later developed by Karl Marx, who saw the liberating potential of labor but focused more on the need to overthrow the entire system of class and alienation. Bong Joon-ho, however, remains a detached observer, presenting the situation without offering an easy revolutionary solution.

The Smell of Another World

One of the film's most haunting aspects is its refusal to paint characters in black and white. The Parks are not monsters. They are not consciously cruel; they are just insulated by their wealth, living in a different reality. The "smell" of the Kims—a smell of poverty, of the subway, of the semi-basement—is what ultimately gives them away. To Mr. Park, it’s not the smell of a bad person, but the smell of another species, a line he cannot tolerate being crossed. It’s a symbol of a class divide so deep it becomes biological.

The Kims, on the other hand, are kind and loving to one another, but the struggle for survival pushes them past ethical boundaries. They lie, cheat, and ultimately engage in violence because, in a world of scarce resources, there is no other way to get ahead. Their poverty forces them to constantly overcome boundaries, both physical and moral. Meanwhile, the Parks' wealth is all about maintaining boundaries. Their house may have transparent glass walls, but it’s surrounded by an impenetrable fence—a perfect metaphor for a system that appears open but is, in fact, rigidly closed.

The problem, the film insists, is not the personal failing of any individual, but the system itself.

Who Is the Real Parasite?

So, who is the parasite of the title? Is it the poor family leeching off the rich, or the rich family that cannot survive without the labor of the poor? The film’s brilliant, unsettling answer is that everyone is a parasite.

In a capitalist society, the director suggests, every person is fundamentally dependent on another in a transactional, often exploitative, way. This creates a state of alienation—from our own potential, from the things we produce, and most tragically, from each other. We become competitors and enemies, all scrambling for a higher position on the same precarious ladder. The only thing that keeps the Kim family together is their powerful bond, a small island of solidarity in an ocean of competition.

Aristotle once defined humanity as a "political animal," meaning we are inherently social creatures who need society to realize our full potential. Parasite asks a chilling follow-up question: What happens when that society forces us to be parasites? It’s a universal theme that makes the story feel just as true in Seoul as it does in London or Mexico City.

The film leaves its final question hanging in the air. When an entire society is built on parasitic relationships, can it ever be harmonious? Or will the alienation and competition only grow stronger? Parasite offers no easy answers, only a profound and disturbing reflection of the world we all inhabit.

References

• Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). Oxford University Press.

  This work contains the foundational "Lordship and Bondage" (or Master-Slave) section (pp. 111–119). It explains the dynamic where the dependent "slave" consciousness, through labor and shaping the world, ultimately achieves a more profound self-awareness than the independent "master" consciousness, which only consumes. This mirrors the relationship between the active Kims and the passive Parks.

• Marx, K. (1959). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (M. Milligan, Trans.). Progress Publishers.

  In the chapter "Estranged Labour," Marx details how capitalism alienates workers from the products of their labor, from their own humanity, and from each other. This text provides the theoretical backbone for the film's critique of a system that turns people into competitors and reduces their value to their economic function, a central theme in Parasite.

• McGowan, T. (2021). The Ruthlessness of the Real: Hegel and the Impossible Politics of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Crisis and Critique, 8(2), 231–248.

  This scholarly article provides a direct and insightful analysis of the film through a Hegelian lens. It argues that Parasite demonstrates how the fantasy of upward mobility within capitalism prevents any real structural change. The author explores how the characters are trapped by a system that they can’t see beyond, reinforcing the film’s critique of capitalism’s ideological hold.