Due to the sudden COVID-19 outbreak, I had to fly home for the extended spring break and a week of school, which eventually turned into the rest of the semester. I typically take two to three flights to and from school since the Richmond airport does not offer any direct flights to Hawaii. Because it was still spring break, I did not have a great deal of work to complete while traveling, so I tried to think of ideas to help pass the time to prevent boredom. Depending on how tired I am when I board my flights, I will usually end up sleeping for a majority of the time, but I was pretty well rested since I had been on spring break for the past week. I decided to browse through the films offered on my first plane and I came across Parasite, or 기생충 in Korean.
Parasite recently won four Academy Awards– Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film– and made history for being the first South Korean film to receive an Academy Award, as well as the first foreign film to win Best Picture. It has also been recognized for a number of other awards but especially made history at the 92nd Academy Awards in February. I personally have heard nothing but positive reviews about the film and had been meaning to watch it for some time now. I was supposed to watch it with Jimin and a few of her other language learning partners but it ended up not working out.
This post is going to be a bit of a spoiler but I’ll try to only discuss the gist of the story. It was basically about the low-income Kim family, who have worked a variety of temporary failing jobs in the past. In the beginning, the son’s good friend gifts him a rock which is supposed to bring him wealth and urges him to take over his tutoring job as he leaves to study abroad. His friend tutors English for the eldest daughter in the wealthy Park family and the Kim son is successfully able to get the job. The rest of the Kims slowly infiltrate the life of the Park family, with the daughter, father, and mother slyly posing as unrelated and highly qualified workers. The Kim daughter poses as an art therapist for the younger son, the father replaces the family driver, and the mother replaces the housekeeper. One day when the Parks leave for a camping trip, the Kims indulge in the luxuries of the Park’s home and celebrate their increasing wealth resulting from their new jobs. Suddenly, the old housekeeper appears and requests to retrieve something that she left in the house. She reveals an underground bunker, where her husband had been living for years to avoid loan sharks. She eventually finds out about the Kim family’s scam but her and her husband are wounded and forced into the bunker when the Park family arrives home early. The next day, the Park family hosts a birthday party for the son and the Kim family members are all invited. The Kim son brings the rock to face the couple in the bunker, but he is attacked by the husband who is enraged by his wife’s death. The husband runs out and stabs the Kim daughter with a kitchen knife to avenge his wife. Her mother kills him and the father ends up killing the Park father after seeing his disgusted reaction to who he thought was a dirty, smelly homeless man. The story ends with the daughter dying, the father retreating to the basement to avoid criminal charges, and the mother and son facing convictions of fraud. The son vows to make enough money so that he can purchase the house, which is occupied by a new family, and eventually free his father.
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