Embedded Files
Every review of Parasite (2019) names a human villain. Some blame the Parks for their oblivious wealth. Others blame the Kims for their deception. A few blame Moon-gwang for her desperation. Nobody blames the house. They should.
Bong Joon-ho did not build a set. He built a class system with walls.
South Korea organises its people into four economic layers: the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the poverty class. The Park house maps these layers exactly. The upper floor belongs to the Parks, elevated and insulated from everything below. The ground floor is middle-class performance space, where the Kims work, serve, and pretend. The semi-basement is working-class survival, close enough to the street to see normal life but never quite part of it. The hidden basement is poverty made invisible, a space South Korean society built and then chose to forget.
The architecture does not just reflect class. It manufactures the behaviour of every person inside it.
Once the Kims occupy the ground floor, they do not celebrate. They look down. They mock Geun-se's smell. They protect their new positions against the very people they replaced. The house trained them to do this. It gave them a floor and told them, without words, that keeping it required contempt for anyone below. The Parks do the same to the Kims. The Kims do the same to the basement dwellers. The building runs this logic on everyone inside it. This is what existing publications miss. They frame the class contempt in Parasite as a human failing, a product of greed or fear or survival instinct. But the contempt is structural. The house produces it automatically. You do not need to be a bad person to kick down. You only need to be one floor higher than someone else.
The banjiha, the semi-basement the Kims occupy at the start of the film, was not a filmmaker's invention. South Korea legalised these spaces in the 1970s to house the flood of workers arriving in Seoul during rapid industrialisation. They were originally nuclear fallout shelters. The government converted survival infrastructure into working-class housing and called it progress. Bong Joon-ho did not imagine a metaphor. He filmed an existing condition.
This is the argument the film makes that most critics stop short of: the people in Parasite are not the problem. Remove the Kims and another family takes the semi-basement. Remove Moon-gwang and another housekeeper takes her floor. The film proves this directly. After the violence, the Parks do not stay. They move out, traumatised and displaced. Another wealthy family moves in, occupies the same upper floor, and the system resets. New people, same floors, same contempt. The architecture outlasts every occupant.
The real tragedy of Ki-woo is not that he failed to climb. It is that climbing required him to become the thing he resented. The house offered him a floor and he took it, and taking it meant defending it, and defending it meant despising anyone who threatened it from below. He did not choose this. The building chose it for him.
South Korea's class system works the same way. The SKY university pipeline, the chaebol employment structure, the property market concentrated in Seoul, these are not policies that emerged from individual greed. They are architecture. They are floors built by previous generations that sort every new person who enters them automatically, teaching contempt from the top down and desperation from the bottom up.
Bong Joon-ho never confirms who the parasite is. Most viewers assume it is the Kims, feeding off the Parks. Some argue it is the Parks, feeding off cheap labour. Both miss the point. The parasite is the vertical structure itself, the floors, the hierarchy, the logic that tells everyone their worth is determined by where they sleep. The Kims are not parasites on the Parks. Both families are parasites on a system that needs them exactly where they are.
Every occupant feeds the house. The house feeds nothing back.
“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” — Bong Joon-ho
I stopped watching films the way I used to. Life got busy, streaming made everything feel disposable as I scrolled more than I watched. Then I found Abbas Kiarostami.
The Filmmaker Who Strips Everything Away
Kiarostami built Iranian cinema into something the world had to notice. Before him, Iranian film meant little outside Iran. After him, festivals celebrated it. Directors studied it. Audiences discovered a cinema of patience and truth.
He rejected Hollywood's grammar. No swelling scores. No dramatic close-ups. No neat resolutions. He pointed his camera at real people in real places and let them exist. His visual language: static shots, long takes, winding roads through mountains. Cars drive, people talk, children search, and life unfolds without manipulation. You watch a boy climb a hill for minutes. The camera doesn't move. Your mind does the work.
He rejected Hollywood's grammar. No swelling scores. No dramatic close-ups. No neat resolutions. He pointed his camera at real people in real places and let them exist. His visual language: static shots, long takes, winding roads through mountains. Cars drive, people talk, children search, and life unfolds without manipulation. You watch a boy climb a hill for minutes. The camera doesn't move. Your mind does the work.
Close-Up shows his approach perfectly. A poor man impersonates film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He convinces a family he'll cast them in his next film. When he's caught, Kiarostami films the real trial. Then he recreates scenes with the actual people involved. The impostor plays himself. The family plays themselves. Truth and performance blur until you stop caring about the distinction. The impostor says something in the film I return to often: “I become a different person with every one I watch. I'm reborn.” He's talking about watching films. About how cinema transforms him. About how each story adds to who he is.
I felt that watching Kiarostami.
The Koker Trilogy and the Earthquake. In 1990, an earthquake destroyed villages in northern Iran. Kiarostami had filmed Where Is the Friend's House? in the region years before. He returned to see if the child actors survived.
That search became And Life Goes On. He films a director (playing himself but not himself) driving through rubble looking for the boys. You see destruction. You see people rebuilding. You never get clear answers about who lived or died. Then, Through the Olive Trees films the making of And Life Goes On. A young man loves a young woman. She won't speak to him. He's poor, and she comes from a better family. They play newlyweds in the film within the film. Between takes, he pursues her, and she stays silent.
The final shot lasts minutes. Two figures walk across a landscape. The camera stays far away. You strain to see if she's responding. No dialogue you hear, no music, just two people in a vast space. You want resolution. Kiarostami refuses. The ambiguity becomes the meaning. These films ask: What are you watching? Documentary? Fiction? Does the line matter? The earthquake destroyed homes, but people endured. The camera witnesses without judgment.
Taste of Cherry and the Refusal to Answer: A man drives around Tehran. He needs someone to bury him after he dies. He asks a soldier, a seminarian, and a taxidermist. Long takes in the car and Minimal cutting. Conversations about life and death. The film refuses to tell you why he wants to die. It refuses to tell you if he succeeds. The camera stays distant. You sit with the question, not the answer.
Critics called it boring. Some walked out at Cannes. It won the Palme d'Or.
Kiarostami believed cinema should make you think, not feel manipulated. He stripped away comfort. What remains is pure: observation, patience, trust in your intelligence.
What These Films Did to Me. I fell in love watching Kiarostami. Not with a person. With a way of seeing. His films showed me purity, Clarity, and the spirit of artistry without ego. He points at the world and says: look, Really look. Find meaning in what's there. The simplicity made me want to create. I started taking more pictures. Recording videos. Documenting the mundane, a walk, a conversation or light through a window. Life is made of these moments. Joy and peace live in the ordinary.
I am a mosaic of all the films I've watched. Each one adds a tile. Kiarostami added entire sections. He changed the pattern.I started watching films again. Not as background noise. But As art demanding attention. I discovered Akira Kurosawa. Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Ikiru. More layers, More ways of seeing. I had watched foreign films before. Subtitles never scared me. But Kiarostami opened a door I didn't know was closed. He showed me cinema as meditation. As philosophy, a mirror (a sliver) held up to existence itself.
The Invitation
Bong Joon-ho's quote about the one-inch barrier speaks truth. Subtitles are nothing but a minor adjustment. What waits beyond them: entire worlds, new languages of image and sound, stories your country will never tell.
Image by Anisa (Twitter)
Kiarostami is waiting there, so is Kurosawa, so are Bergman, Tarkovsky, Ozu, Ray, Bong Joon-ho, Varda, and Wong Kar-wai. Whole cinemas you haven't experienced. These films have layers. They require patience. You peel them slowly to reach the core. The work rewards you, your understanding deepens and you see more each time. Start with Kiarostami. Watch Close-Up. Let it confuse you. Let it sit with you. Watch it again. Notice what changes. Then keep going. There are decades of masterpieces waiting. All you need to do is read while you watch.
The barrier is one inch tall. Step over it.
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