Parasite: the staircase as destiny

Few recent films explain so much with a handrail. In Parasite everything is topography: the Kims live in a semi-basement where the street is visible only from the waist up; the Parks live in a display-case house at the top of the hill. Between one address and the other there are stairs — and it is on those stairs that Bong Joon-ho installs his narrative machine.

The first half is a con comedy in a state of grace: one by one the Kims find work in the rich house under invented identities, and the screenplay, built with Swiss precision, makes each lie open the door to the next. Song Kang-ho sets the tone — an affable, almost naive patriarch, until the film asks something else of him.

It is at the midpoint turn, which is not worth spoiling, that Parasite shows what it came for: the genre changes floor without warning, comedy descends to the basement, and what was farce becomes literal class war, with rain, blood and a smell no character manages to name out loud.

What lasts

Bong films inequality without speeches: it is in the framing, in the light that comes through the window (or does not), in the time each family needs to get home. The Palme d’Or and the unprecedented Best Picture Oscar for a non-English-language film only confirmed what audiences already knew — this is the film the decade asked for.

On disc the experience grows: 4K preserves the millimetric production design of the house (built on a set, from the garden to the bunker), and the black-and-white edition, approved by the director, reveals a second film inside the first.