Analysis of the Film: Parasite

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Parasite: Film Review
Introduction
Parasite is a South Korean black comedy thriller produced on 30th May 2019 and directed by Bong Joon-ho. The director's screenplay was written in association with Han Jin-won and is available in two languages: Korean and English. The main actors in the film include Cho Yeo-Jeong (as Yeon-Kyo), Woo-Sik Choi (as Ki-woo), Park So-dam (as Ki-Jung), Kang-Ho Song (as Kim-taek), and Lee Sun-Kyun (as Park Dong-ik). The film's success is evidenced by the several nominations and awards it received, including the Academy Award for Best Picture (2020), Academy Award for Best International Feature (2020), and the Bafta Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film was rated 8.6/10 on IMDb, 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, and 96% on Metacritic. The film is a classic depiction of the widening gap between the poor and wealthy and the potential dangers the situation might result in within and without families regardless of the social class. Thus, the paper is a review of the film based on the widening socio-economic class divide.
Film Summary
The Kims are a low-income family residing in a cramped shabby basement apartment in Seoul's lower working-class resident (Chang). The family consists of a mother (Chung-sook), a father (Ki-taek), and two offspring young adults in Ki-woo (son) and Ki-Jung (daughter) (Joon-ho). The parents have lived in poverty for so long that they do not even realize it because they don't know any other kind of life. Collectively, the family perpetrates minor scams for survival. Even when they get jobs, they have a habit of doing only the minimum of the required tasks, and therefore, none can keep a job for long. Among them, Ki-woo has ambitions to join the university and get out of poverty. When Min (Ki-woo's friend) chooses to go to university, he recommends Ki-woo take over his tutoring job to Park Da-Hye. Park Da-Hye is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Parks, a wealthy family who is all about status.
Min encourages Ki-woo to lie about his educational status so that he could take advantage of Mrs. Park’s simple-mindedness (Tallerico). Upon getting the job, Ki-woo discovers that the family is looking for an art therapist for Da-song, her son. He recommends his friend 'Jessica' (Ki-Jung) (Joon-ho). The fraud continues to the extent that Kim's plan to replace all the family members' employees. The toughest employee to get rid of is Moon-gwang, the housekeeper. Chung-sook becomes the family housekeeper while Ki-taek takes over as the family chauffeur. The Kims enjoy a short span of income before the whole lie turns into a disaster.
Expanded Evaluation
The criteria used in the film review involve a look at the socio-economic gap in South Korea, the interaction between the poor and the rich, the director, characters, and how critics evaluated the movie. While Karl Marx viewed class struggle concerning production, Max Weber thought that class struggle is concerning educational development (Levin). In Parasite, education emerges as the major theme through which a person can be elevated out of poverty.
The Director
With its advancement in technology and wealth, Korea seems glamorous from the outside, but from the inside, th...