Parasite

Which family is the true parasite?  I watched this for the first time a few years back for a Sociology of Crime class in college. I wrote a paper about it, about who really is the parasite in this story. Is it the Kims, who slowly and carefully infiltrated their way into the Parks home, the housekeeper who the Kims had fired and her husband who relied on the Park's basement as a place to live? Parasites rely on their host, using the host to benefit themselves and ultimately harming the host. The Parks could also be seen as the parasites, for their family and home cannot function unless they have a driver, tutors, and a housekeeper. The socioeconomic classes portrayed in this film all need each other in order to thrive. In this case, the poor rely on the rich for income and housing, and the rich rely on the poor to work for them. All of the characters can be seen as parasites, draining each other for their own personal benefit. There is a moment where Mr. Kims daughters asks him “what’s the plan?” after they discover Geun-sae in the basement, and Mr. Kim says that it doesn’t matter, for life never goes according to plan. We see the parallel of that dialogue at the end of the film when Ki-Woo comes up with a plan to make a bunch of money and buy the house to set his father free, and we as the watcher can only assume that things don’t realistically work out that way in the end.