The Window at the Height of Feet

The first thing the film shows is laundry. A few pairs of socks hang from a collapsible rack in a window, drying in whatever light the window can spare, and the window can spare very little, because it has been cut into the wall at the level of the sidewalk. Beyond the glass, feet go by. A man’s shoes, a woman’s, a wheeled cart, the bottom third of a neighborhood. The camera lowers itself from the socks into the room with the unhurried patience of someone stepping down into a cellar, and by the time it settles on Kim Ki-woo, sitting under the window with a phone raised over his head, the essential fact has already been delivered without a line of dialogue. This is a home you enter by descending. Its inhabitants look up at a world that looks down at them, and what they see of it, most of the time, is the part nobody bothers to keep clean.

Ki-woo is hunting for a signal. The neighbor whose Wi-Fi the family had been quietly borrowing has finally put a password on it, and the phone, which is also the family’s phone book, employment office, and news of the outside, has gone dead in his hand. He and his sister Ki-jung climb toward the one place in the apartment where the outside might still leak in: the toilet, which sits on a raised platform near the ceiling because the sewer line runs higher than the floor. They stand with their arms stretched above the bowl, faces tilted upward, like two people trying to catch rain in a drought, and there, above the toilet, a bar of signal appears. That the highest point in this household is a toilet is the first of the film’s architectural jokes, and it is characteristic of Bong Joon Ho that the joke is also a piece of plumbing. Nothing here is symbolic in the way a critic might wish. It is worse than symbolic. It is true.

Then the fog comes. A municipal fumigation truck passes in the street outside, pumping pale insecticide along the gutters, and Ki-taek, the father, tells his family to leave the window open. Free extermination. The white cloud pours over the sill and fills the room, and the four of them go on folding pizza boxes inside it, coughing, squinting, working faster to finish a batch that pays by the piece, while the poison meant for stink bugs does its work on their lungs. In fewer than ten minutes the film has established the entire register in which it will operate. The scene is funny; the father’s thrift is a kind of genius. The scene is desperate; a family that welcomes pesticide into its kitchen has run out of other ways to be clean. The scene is tender; they cough together, they finish the boxes together. And the scene is dangerous in a way none of them has time to notice, because the smoke that enters through the open window is a rehearsal for the water that will enter through it later, and for the smell that will leave through it every morning on their clothes. What comes in at street level, in this apartment, is whatever the street decides to send.

Bong and his co-writer Han Jin-won build the opening around the apartment’s one great architectural property, which is that it is neither underground nor above it. The window admits daylight, a thin, gray, secondhand daylight that has already been used by the sidewalk, and it admits everything else too. A drunk will stop to urinate against the wall beside it, close enough that the family can watch him from the table. The exterminator’s fog will roll through it. Floodwater, before the film is done, will come through it in a brown wave. The Kims live at a height from which the world is visible but not enterable on equal terms, and the film’s first movement is a study in what this partial view does to intelligence. Everything they know, they know by looking up. They read feet and shoes and the underside of other people’s routines. They are, by necessity, connoisseurs of surfaces, and the tragedy waiting for them is that a surface is exactly what a rich household will hire and exactly what it will refuse to see beneath.

It has become customary to describe Parasite as a satire in which a poor family cons a rich one, and the description is accurate the way a floor plan is accurate about a house. What the film is actually about, from the socks in the window onward, is people obliged to live inside an architecture they did not design. Every character in it, upstairs or down, spends the film trying to rise, to descend, to hide, to perform, to employ, or to consume another person, and none of these schemes leaves so much as a scratch on the structure itself. That is the source of the film’s peculiar terror, which is not the terror of a villain. There is no mastermind. There is nobody sitting in a tower deciding that the Kims should be poor. The system reproduces itself through the ordinary furniture of life: through houses and jobs, through manners and referrals, through debts, appetites, daydreams, and odors, through the placement of bodies in rooms. A staircase enforces it. ...