The Architecture Is The Plot

Bong Joon-ho pitched Parasite as a story about two families and gave his production designer one instruction that organises everything: the camera should always know how far above or below street level it is. The Kim family's semi basement has a window at pavement height, so the world arrives as feet and tyres and the occasional drunk. The Park family's house, built from scratch as a set on an empty lot, is reached by climbing. Every important turn in the plot is a movement up or down a staircase, and the film asks you to keep count. Bong called it a comedy without clowns and a tragedy without villains, and he meant it literally. Nobody here does anything a person in their position would not plausibly do. The catastrophe is structural, and the one thing no amount of climbing can fix is the smell that follows you up.