...One of Parasite’s most radical moves is to make its wealthy characters, the Park family, not particularly miserable or bad; they’re nothing like, for instance, the Roy family in HBO’s popular show Succession. The Parks are moral, friendly, and not harboring any horrible secrets (that they’re aware of, anyhow), and they’re not made miserable so we can experience schadenfreude. They’re oblivious to their privilege, but they’re not heinous monsters....Similarly, the poorer family the Kims are not righteous and upright heroes. Parasite doesn’t patronize them by pretending they are ennobled by their poverty. Yet they’re still people who love one another and experience moments of happiness together. And when even poorer people show up, people who are in more dire straits than the Kims or the Parks, the movie pointedly makes it clear to us that they have, and enjoy, sex.
In this way, Parasite makes humans of everyone in its story. Nobody’s a caricature. Nobody’s even really a villain. Instead, the system in which they live is the villain, a system that permits them to live at these different levels (levels being very important in this film) — even though they’re all humans, and all deserve equal dignity and footing in the world.
What you actually see in Parasite’s social critique probably has a lot to do with whatever wavelengths your political radar is tuned in to. But in a way, that fact makes it even better. Parasite embodies a very clear indictment of systematic inequality, but it makes plenty of room for audiences to simply watch it and enjoy it as entertainment; it never sermonizes. The message is there, but Parasite plays its cards so close to its chest that you might not realize what it’s saying till you’re already on board.
