Parasite Review

Bong builds the film out of vertical geography before he builds it out of plot. The Kims live half-underground, the Parks live up a hill behind a wall, and every movement between them is stairs. The first half is a precision con: the forged credentials, the peach-fuzz allergy, the Jessica jingle set to a nursery tune, each infiltration timed like a heist beat. Then the doorbell rings and the housekeeper comes back, and the movie discovers a floor below the floor it already showed you.

Hong Kyung-pyo shoots the Park house as clean horizontals and the semi-basement in cramped diagonals, and the flood sequence descends the city literally downhill, one long fall from marble to sewage. The smell motif is the sharpest thing here: an odor nobody can name is the one class marker money cannot launder, and it becomes the murder motive. Song Kang-ho plays humiliation in the eyes, not the mouth. The fantasy epilogue spells out an irony the images already carried, the one place Bong distrusts his own construction. Everything before it is machined to the thousandth.