Parasite

The Kim family's window looks out on a man urinating in the street.

It is not much of a view. They live in a semi-basement, low enough to see shoes before faces and high enough to get a little daylight. The window brings the city in: drunk men, stink bugs, fumigation gas. When the street is sprayed, Ki-taek tells his family to leave it open. Free extermination. They cough through the poison while folding pizza boxes.

The Parks have a window too. Their living-room wall opens onto a lawn so perfect it looks like a painting. Sunlight pours in. Rain makes the grass greener. What enters this house has already been screened, framed, paid for. One family looks up at the street. The other looks out on a private world.

Bong starts with the windows. Before anyone explains the difference between these families, we've seen what each can see from home. That's the whole movie, really. It thinks through rooms.

The plot begins with a forged document. Ki-woo becomes the Park daughter's English tutor, then finds openings for the rest of his family. Ki-jung arrives as an art therapist. Ki-taek takes the car. Chung-sook takes the kitchen. Each vacancy is manufactured. Peach fuzz does what a gun might do in another movie.

I want the scheme to work. That's an uncomfortable thing to admit when the people they displace are workers one rung above them. The driver has done nothing wrong. Neither has the housekeeper. But Ki-jung is so good at reading the house, at figuring out what its owners want to hear, that I get caught up watching her do it. I know who's paying for the joke. I still laugh.

Talent is everywhere in this film. Security isn't.

Then the doorbell rings.

The Parks have gone camping. The Kims are spread across the living room. The old housekeeper, Moon-gwang, comes back for something in the basement. Her husband has been living down there for years. He survives on food she brings him and works the stairway lights when Mr. Park comes home, thanking a man who doesn't know he exists.

The fight that follows is frantic and ridiculous. They aren't battling the Parks. They're battling for the chance to serve the Parks. Finding someone worse off gives the Kims another person to push aside.

This is where I start to resist the film a little. Once the bunker opens, almost everyone has a place in the diagram. The family below street level finds another family farther down, underneath the rich people who barely register either of them. I understand it immediately, and part of me wishes I didn't. How much room is left for these people to surprise me once I know what each level means?

The bunker works. It just over-explains a movie that had already made its point with two windows.

After the Parks return, the Kims hide under the living-room table. Mr. Park talks about Ki-taek's smell. It's like an old radish, a boiled rag, the subway. He's already praised his driver for never crossing the line. Smell crosses it for him.

The first time I watched that scene, I still wanted the Kims to get away with it. I'd enjoyed the con. Then Ki-taek had to lie there and listen to Mr. Park talk about his smell. Getting caught stopped being the only thing I was worried about. There's nothing he can say from under that table. He has to hear the whole conversation.

They can print credentials and rehearse roles. When the children notice the family shares a smell, they try changing soaps. Ki-taek understands first. It's the basement smell. You have to leave the basement. That's harder than laundering a shirt.

The three Kims escape and descend through street after street while water follows gravity toward the people who can least afford it. By the time they reach their neighborhood, the semi-basement is filling with sewage. The next morning Mrs. Park says the rain has cleared the air.

I can explain what that contrast means, but the explanation adds very little to watching them arrive home. They've spent the evening trying to keep their places in the Parks' house. Now they need somewhere to sleep.

I keep waiting for the Parks to do something monstrous. Instead they just worry about their kids and flinch at a smell. They can be affectionate and funny. Mr. Park values a driver who knows when to stay quiet. What he can't tolerate is being reminded, by something as ordinary as a smell, that the driver has a life outside the car.

At the birthday party, Ki-woo goes downstairs carrying the scholar's stone. The promise of prosperity has become something he thinks he can use to settle things in the bunker. Instead, Moon-gwang's husband attacks him with it, then comes up onto the lawn with a knife. Ki-jung is stabbed. The party collapses while Mr. Park demands the car keys so he can take his own son to the hospital. Reaching for them, he covers his nose.

Ki-taek sees him do it.

I understand why that gesture is the one he can't bear. I still can't make the killing feel like justice. His daughter is bleeding in front of him. He kills Mr. Park, leaves his family behind, and ends up hiding in the same bunker. Nothing about that gives me the satisfaction the earlier scheme did.

That difference matters more to my judgment than how neatly I can account for every symbol. Bong gets me to enjoy what the Kims are doing, then makes staying with them increasingly difficult. I can follow their desperation without feeling that it excuses everything.

Engagement is a 10.0. Knowing what's downstairs doesn't release the film's hold. Ease is almost as straightforward: 9.6. I can hand this to someone without an instruction manual or a warning about pacing.

Greatness is where my reservation belongs. The 9.6 leaves room for the discomfort I have with the bunker without pretending that discomfort outweighs everything the film accomplishes. I don't need to settle it more neatly than that.

I kept waiting for the movie to offer an easier way out, some clean revolution or punishment.

Ki-woo's answer is to become rich enough to buy the house. One day he'll walk into the garden and his father will come upstairs into the sun. Bong shows the reunion. For a moment it looks as certain as anything else we've watched.

I want to let him have that ending. Buying the house would mean he could bring his father home. After everything that's happened, it's an ordinary wish attached to an almost impossible amount of money.

Then the film cuts back to Ki-woo in the semi-basement.

The small window is still there. Outside, the world passes at the height of other people's feet.

He hasn't moved.