There are a number of reasons why Parasite is considered as one of the best movies released last year. One of those reasons is the speciality of this film which is how the movie has portrayed one of the biggest problems in the world since time immemorial which is called as the Wealth Gap. The way the director appears to use the name of the film from beginning to the end to highlight the depth of the socio-economic problem is something which makes this movie quite unique.
The fundamental characteristic of a Parasite is that it relies on a bigger entity for its own survival and growth. In case of trees, they take a portion of the energy and food that belongs to a bigger tree for survival and growth. So, in this movie, we are introduced to a Parasitic family of Ki-woo who tries to rely on the wealthy Parker family for their own growth and the events that follow, which are portrayed beautifully.
The movie begins by showcasing the level of poverty in Ki-woo’s family. How they try to steal their neighbour’s WiFi and how they argue with the Pizza delivery guy for money and the part about using fake certificates to get a job, are some of the attempts to make us understand that situation of the family. However, it is when they join with the Parker family that we get to feel the full extent of the wealth gap and we Ki-woo get affected by the same resulting in him resort to all sorts of malice and get the entire family employed in the Parker’s household.
The speciality of this movie is that we can look at it from the perspective of three families. At one side, we have Ki-woo’s family who decide to use the situation as a golden opportunity to get themselves out of the utter poverty that they were trapped in and we have Ki-woo’s father whom we see at the end realising and trying to protect whats actually important for him and his contempt towards the wealthy people who appear to be extremely selfish having utter disregard for anyone other than themselves. At the other side, we have the Parker family where we see that Mr. Parker, even unbeknown to himself has become a part of the problem of inequality where the family who is seen to enjoy their wealth and luxury has become an accessory to the crime. In the climax, we see in Mr. Parker a father who is trying his best to protect his son. We even see him ignore the fact that the girl on the other side who may be dying is a daughter of another father which makes Ki-woo’s father judge him to be selfish, which results in him getting stabbed by Ki-woo’s father. One might wonder if it is a result of the wealth gap that prompted Ki-woo’s father to take such a drastic step.
Now, its also possible to look at the movie from the perspective of family belonging to the former maid where she was fired out of a misunderstanding in-spite of her being so flawless in her services till then. She has been struggling to survive and take care of her husband and so loosing the job has made things much worse for her especially financial matters as what she did was to escape from the debts in which they were trapped in. But, in the end she looses her own life and we see the husband loose his mind having failed to protect his wife. To summarise, all the three families have only tried to protect whats most important to themselves and director leaves the judgement on who is on the right side and who is not, to the audience.
The way this movie portrays the inequality based on wealth is amazing even to the point of showing perfectly how even rain affects the poor and the wealthy ie, we see Ki-woo’s family suffer from rain water leaking into their home forcing them to move out making rain a curse for them while at the Parker residence, people are happy that it rained at night so that next day they will not have to face the rain so that the birthday party can go on uninterrupted. Get it?
So, basically this movie tries to give a perfect representation of how Financial Stability and Financial Instability affects a society. It goes to further show us how selfish wealth can make a person and the level at which a person can do anything to acquire it. I would say that the movie has been successful in both and this is why Parasite is indeed one of the best movies released last year.