As already hinted in the title, this post contains plenty of spoilers so DO NOT read it if you haven’t seen the movie yet but plan to watch it. In short, we are not surprised by the popularity of this movie given just how relatable both the characters and the social divides presented within the movie are to the masses. This makes perfect sense when you take into account how the gap in haves and have-nots among the millennial generation will be one of the biggest in the past hundred years. Of course, what shouldn’t come as a surprise is that our takeaways from the movie are quite different as we don’t agree with the premise that your social means severely hinder your opportunities to become rich. As we proved in a previous post, access to information is both low-cost and readily available in today’s world, meaning anyone with a basic smartphone has no excuse to not make use of an unlimited pool of online resources to climb the wealth ladder. For this reason, we don’t fully relate to this movie, but we will give our own contrarian take on the themes and messages it explores.
Background/Plot Set-Up: If you watched this movie within the past 12 months feel free to skip this section. If not, here is a refresher.
Character Names: To keep it easy we will segregate them into three groups and create designations to shorten their names.
- Kim Family (Poor/Working Class): Kim- Son (Kevin/Kim Ki-woo), Kim- Daughter (Jessica/Kim Ki-jung), Mr. Kim (Father/Kim Ki-taek), Mrs. Kim (Mother/Choi Yeon-gyo)
- Park Family (Rich): Mr. Park (Father/Nathan/Park Dong-ik), Mrs. Park (Mother/Madame/Choi Yeon-gyo), Park- Daughter (Park Da-hye), Park- Son (Park Da-song)
- Other Relevant Characters: Original Housekeeper, Original Housekeeper’s Husband, College Friend (of Kim Son), Original Park Family Chauffeur
Background to Plot: The movie is a social satire concerning two families, one poor (the Kims) and one rich (the Parks). The Kims live in a grimy, ramshackle basement apartment with a serious insect infestation problem and depend on the lower end of the gig economy to get by. The Parks on the other hand live an Instagram-perfect life on a hilltop mansion with a business executive husband and a wife who lives a carefree life insulated from hardships and discomfort (due to the wealth accumulated by Mr. Park). This juxtaposition is interesting when you take into consideration that both families also consist of the exact same composition: husband, wife, daughter and son. Reaching the Park family’s house involves going up a set of stairs and then traversing up a hill, while the Kim family goes down a set of stairs to reach their apartment which lies below street level. This visual depiction represents the wealth and class disparity between the two.
Initial Plot: The beginning of the movie actually contains a pretty funny hidden message if you pay close attention to it and then contrast with what happens later on into the plot. Kim Son is drinking Soju (Korean alcoholic beverage) at a street stall with a friend from Yonsei University (one of the top colleges in the country). The friend works as an English tutor for the daughter of a wealthy family (the Parks) but is leaving for the semester to study abroad. He is romantically interested in the daughter and offers his friend his well-paying job during his absence. The offer is transactional – in return for this referral, Kim Son cannot get involved with the Park Daughter. By the midway point of the movie, it becomes clear that Kim Son has already violated this handshake deal and has no intention of stopping his pursuit of her. The message here is to never easily trust poor people as it usually always ends in a catastrophe. This sounds harsh but contains a heavy dose of truth: The accumulation of wealth is determined by the cumulative quality of choices you make over time, so in the majority of cases it would be foolish to trust someone with little money to oversee something that is dear to your heart.
Anyways, returning to the plot itself, here’s what happens sequentially: 1) Yonsei University friend assists Kim Son with securing a lucrative tutoring job and gives him a “Scholar’s Rock” (will discuss this in more detail later), 2) Kim Son gets his sister Kim Daughter to forge some fake academic transcripts and documents, 3) Kim Son goes off to the interview posing as a Yonsei University student and secures the job offer.
Plot Detail #1 – Nothing is Distinctly Black or White, Everything is Gray: The movie is set up in a way that initially presents Kim Son as the protagonist, and the audience feels inclined to root for him, but by the second half of the plot it becomes clear that no one family is likable. While the Kims were extremely amusing and sympathetic (due to their poor living conditions), they show themselves to be evil to the point of being cartoonish as they make no effort to utilize their considerable intelligence and street smarts to move beyond their existing circumstances, choosing instead to con people and having no hesitation to kill those they perceive as threats. By the end of the first thirty minutes they already live up to the title of the movie, where despite finally securing high paying jobs for the entire family through Kim Son’s initial con, they take full advantage of the Park family by acting as parasites.
At the same time, the Park family is not remotely evil in any sense of the word. They pay everyone in full and on time and are not abusive in any way. To the average viewer, there is likely a degree of jealousy towards the Park family (we can’t be totally sure as we don’t fall into this pool) due to their affluent background, but the reality is they are the victims. Sure, they are largely insensitive and ignorant of the circumstances of others, but being successful and self-absorbed by no means makes you bad (not to mention evil). Insensitive remarks such as the one made later in the plot by Mr. Park about Mr. Kim’s smell (when he wasn’t even aware that Mr. Kim was present) does not equate to stabbing someone in the chest.
Plot Detail #2 – Short-Term Thinking is Like A Pyramid Scheme: The first part of the movie has the viewer rooting for the entire Kim family to succeed, and it really seems headed that way as one by one a new opportunity opens up for each member. First Kim Son recommends Kim Daughter as an art therapist for Park Son, who is experiencing trauma after an incident where he saw a ghost in the kitchen one night (will come back to this too). Now they have two solid forms of income and in spite of the scams the viewer feels happy for the Park family as it really seems they are slowly climbing up the social ladder and have not harmed anyone in the process (yet). Then the more destructive scheming begins.
Following her interview at the Park family mansion for the Art Therapist gig, the Parks offer Kim Daughter a ride home in their chauffeured luxury sedan, and during the ride she leaves her panties in the car to frame the driver of a sexual encounter, thereby getting him fired. The viewer doesn’t necessarily feel that bad about this as the driver did make a move at her, but the line has now undeniably been crossed: They are ruining the livelihoods of others for their own benefit. This directly contradicts the common poor person complaint that “the rich exploit the lives and hard work of the poor for their own selfish gain.” This turns into a cycle for the Kim family when after he gets hired as the new driver Mr. Kim frames the Original Housekeeper for having tuberculosis and recommends his wife Mrs. Kim as the replacement. Any positive outlook towards the Kim family’s newfound success has now shifted to neutral at best as it is very difficult to cheer on someone who has no qualms about destroying the lives of two people for personal gain.
At this stage the viewer is wondering: What happens next when the Yonsei University student returns from his study abroad trip and witnesses all the new changes? Well, the answer is that at no point does the Kim family have any long-term contingency plan. As with most other poor folks, they are purely focused on accumulating the maximum amount of material gain and comfort in the moment. Their entire cash flow now comes from the pockets of one wealthy man (Mr. Park) and they have destroyed the lives of multiple others just to get there. This is where their ill-planned pyramid scheme begins to unravel.
Plot Detail #3 – Things Can Go From Good to Bad in A Heartbeat: The Park family leaves for a camping trip and announces that they will be gone overnight. The Kim family takes full advantage of this and bask in the many luxuries that abound the home: drinking their expensive liquor, taking food directly from the refrigerator, lying on the beds and going through the Parks’ personal belongings (Kim Son reads Park Daughter’s diary entries). As the Kim family relax in the living room, Kim Son makes the exact same remark as his Yonsei University friend early on in the movie, exclaiming that he will ask Park Daughter out upon her return. The rest of the Kim family laugh and brush this off: they know there is no future in such a relationship as they cannot disclose their ties as a family to the Parks. On a side note, this goes to show that there is never a right moment, hence why it’s important to never procrastinate when it comes to approaching someone you like. Had Kim Son asked Park Daughter out early on, he would not have started the chain reaction of deception and put himself in the position of having to conceal his family ties.
The mood goes from jovial to a sense of trepidation real quick when a sudden ring from the doorbell brings a pause to the Kim family’s festivities. It turns out to be the Original Housekeeper who claims to have left something in the basement which she needs to go and retrieve. Mrs. Kim lets her in but follows her and discovers a hidden entrance into a deep underground bunker where a disheveled man is camping out. The Original Housekeeper confesses that this disheveled man is her husband who is hiding from loan sharks. He is also revealed to be the “Ghost” that Park Son saw appear in the kitchen (the husband comes up late at night to raid the refrigerator for food). Following this revelation, the Original Housekeeper offers Mrs. Kim regular payments in exchange for keeping her mouth shut and allowing the husband to remain in the bunker, but Mrs. Kim refuses. Unfortunately for Mrs. Kim, she loses her leverage when the three other Kims, who had been eavesdropping on the exchange, trip and fall down the stairs, inadvertently revealing their family connections in the process. The Original Housekeeper captures all of this on video and threatens to expose their deceit to the Park family.
Plot Detail #4 – Rather Than Working Together, Poor People Have An Obsessive Focus On Fighting Each Other For the Scraps: The action moves back up to the living room, with the housekeeper and her husband relaxing on the couch while the Kim family is forced to kneel on the floor with their hands raised. The Housekeeper is winning here as she has her finger on the send button for the video recording of the ordeal proving the Kim family’s relationship. Imitating a North Korean TV announcer, the Housekeeper directs verbal abuse towards the Kim family, much to the amusement of her malnourished and mentally precarious husband. As the two wine and dine on the assortment of grub the Kims had taken from the Parks’ kitchen they begin to grow complacent and forget about the Kims. A fight ensues as the Kim family takes advantage of this opportunity to wrestle the phone from the Housekeeper’s hands. They manage to subdue the Housekeeper and her husband and bring them back down to the bunker.
The message here is pretty clear. All of this commotion and drama could have been completely avoided had Mrs. Kim accepted the Original Housekeeper’s offer to keep her mouth shut about the underground bunker (and in turn pocket the cash payments). The reverse is also true. As soon as the Original Housekeeper had leverage on the Kims (the phone video), she could have offered a deal where she would keep her mouth shut about their con in return for them returning the favor and staying quiet about her husband and the bunker. Unfortunately, this is not how things work in reality as most people (especially those who have never made a large sum of money) have a tendency to view everything through the lens of a zero sum game- If I win, you must lose (and vice versa). Even when faced with a clear decision with binary consequences, one being favorable but requiring compromise and the other being potentially disastrous, most people will still go with the latter even if they don’t benefit as long as it means that the other party they are up against definitely loses. For the same reason, the majority of people are not happy when they see their friends succeed and move ahead. As you gain more and more business experience, you will notice that some of your self-professed “friends” turn out to be the least reliable people in your circle, and that the most profitable long-term business relationships are with those who view the world through a non-zero sum approach.
There is also one more message here, which is to never corner someone without providing an exit option. From the perspective of the Original Housekeeper, she and her husband were as good as doomed as soon as Mrs. Kim declined her offer, as it was also revealed earlier in this sequence that her husband is hiding from loan sharks, so kicking him out onto the streets would have been at least figuratively a death sentence. Even in the hypothetical scenario where the rest of the Kim family had not committed the blunder and revealed themselves, it is likely that the Original Housekeeper would have retaliated in some other way out of desperation.
Plot Detail #5 – The Poor Live in Constant Paranoia & Stress: There is a brief moment of relief for the Kim family after they tie up the Housekeeper’s family and lock them back down in the bunker, but this is quickly interrupted when the phone rings and the Parks announce that there is a change of plans and they are heading home and canceling the camping trip due to heavy rain. The Kim family scramble to clean up the mess they created and barely manage just in time as the Parks pull up in the driveway. Mr. Kim, Kim Son and Kim Daughter hide as Mrs. Kim greets the arriving Parks, overhearing Mr. Park’s remark about Mr. Kim’s bad odor. The Kims eventually manage to escape the residence without being detected but return to their basement apartment only to find that it has been completely flooded due to the heavy torrential rains. They frantically grab as many possessions as possible from the dirty sewage water and find shelter in a nearby gymnasium along with other working-class families who were also displaced by the flooding.
Besides the obvious plot components that imply this, we also see many visual indicators too at this point, such as Mr. Kim, Kim Son and Kim Daughter hiding uncomfortably under the table as the Parks return as well as them subsequently sliding from underneath the table and moving on all fours to escape down the staircase. Mr. Park is the final one to leave, and rather than moving down on all fours he literally slithers down the stairs like a snake as he rushes to make his exit. This perfectly depicts not only the stress that the Parks are going through at that point in time (which is more or less entirely their own fault), but also a broader delineation of the fact that they are constantly stressed about something, which only grows with magnitude as the movie progresses. At the start they are simply stressed about paying the bills, but they then trade this stress for the fear of having their con exposed, before trading up again for planning the murder of the Original Housekeeper and her husband (a bit later in the plot).
Plot Detail #6 – Poorly Thought-Out Decisions Can Be Fatal: On the following day the Parks host a birthday party for Park Son with the assistance of Mr. Kim (the driver) and Mrs. Kim (the housekeeper), while the two younger Kims are invited as guests to the party. Kim Son takes this opportunity to sneak away from the main gathering to head down to the bunker and kill the subdued Housekeeper’s family with his Scholar’s Rock. The Housekeeper has already died from a concussion she sustained during the previous night’s brawl, but her husband is still alive and has managed to free himself from the physical restraints and knocks Kim Son out with the Scholar’s Rock, leaving him unconscious in a pool of blood. The husband makes his way out of the bunker and onto the ground level, stabbing Kim Daughter in front of all the guests. Upon seeing the husband (a.k.a. The Ghost) again, Park Son suffers another seizure. Mrs. Kim ends up in a tussle with Housekeeper Husband and impales him with a barbecue skewer. While Mr. Kim tends to Kim Daughter, Mr. Park is more concerned about his son and demands that Mr. Kim drive him to the hospital immediately. Mr. Kim angrily declines and throws the car keys onto the ground, telling Mr. Park to drive himself. As he reaches for the car keys, Mr. Park is visibly bothered by Mr. Kim’s body odor and covers his nose with his hand. Offended by this, Mr. Kim angrily stabs Mr. Park with the same knife, thereby killing him. He then flees amidst the chaos.
This entire sequence basically depicts a string of sudden and quick deaths that arise from a series of rash and poorly thought-out decisions. The message is clear: You should never make rash decisions about anything carrying potentially significant consequences as this will blow up in your face in unpredictable ways and escalate a bad situation to something exponentially worse. Despite the entire Kim family transitioning from the gig economy at the start to stable and secure employment, their quality of living is substantially worse by the latter part of the movie, or in the case of Kim Daughter nonexistent as she is now deceased. We see all the poor decisions culminate by the movie’s end as both Mrs. Kim and Kim Son are convicted of fraud in court while Mr. Kim can no longer be found and has presumably gone into hiding. This is confirmed to be true later at the movie’s conclusion when it is implied that Mr. Kim has now replaced the Original Housekeeper’s Husband as the new hermit inhabiting the bunker of the Park residence, now owned by a German family who is unaware of its history.
Additional Themes & Motifs
The Average Person’s Approach to Plans, Or Lack Thereof: This is something that comes up time and again in the movie that is completely relatable on a universal level. Poverty is something that can be inherited but does not have to be sustained if you are willing to plan ahead and make the necessary changes/improvements to your life. The problem however is that poverty is also a mindset; people with this type of belief system think that plans don’t work, so the best plan is to have no plan at all. In the case of the Kim family, they never had even a remote plan in place and this was what culminated in their downfall. What were they going to do once the college student returned from studying abroad? How would Kim Son explain to his friend (college student) why he got into a relationship with Park Daughter, thereby breaking his promise to this friend? What did Mr. Kim gain by murdering Mr. Park in front of dozens of witnesses? The only true anomaly in this movie that could not have been avoided with advance planning was the giant flood, but every other negative development was completely avoidable and highlights the costs associated with excessively valuing near-term profits over long-term results.
Economic Immobility – And The Importance of Networks/Connections: Rich people become richer by leveraging their connections and place immense value on this, as seen in the first part of the movie as the Park family unwittingly hire all four members of the Kim family through personal referrals. At the same time, through Kim Son’s early interaction with the College Student we also see the use of networks for poor families to get ahead. This carries an important message about societal realities: It is better to go in with a referral than to dive in blind 100% of the time. If you are applying for an extremely coveted position at a top company, you are far more likely to secure an interview with a subpar resume through an internal referral than you are with a top-of-the-line one through an online application. People trust people they already know and spend time with, and this is the case irrespective of wealth/age/racial demographics and so on.
Concluding Remarks
While we don’t agree with everything about this movie, particularly the depiction of economic immobility (i.e. the feeling of hopelessness conveyed in the ending when Kim Son remarks how it will take him over half a millennium at his current income level to afford to buy the same home as the Parks), we do think that the film has very accurately depicted the irrationality of human behavior particularly as it relates to the ordinary masses. With this in mind, we have two main takeaways:
1) Do not be too flashy in front of other people who are not at your level as you will end up generating jealousy and resentment. This will make you a prime target either for “parasites” to live off of and take advantage of you and/or stab you in the back and seek revenge for making them feel inferior.
2) Measure the consequences of any momentous decisions before committing to them. If there is a possibility they can backfire then have a solid contingency plan in place.