The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bong Joon-ho · a film · 2019 · 132 minutes · written with Han Jin-won · in Korean, as Gisaengchung
Mode
Social allegory made as an exact popular thriller; caper, horror and tragedy in one house
Mythos
The house as a three-storeyed cosmos, with an underworld beneath it; the deluge that falls only on those below; the talisman that becomes a weapon
Phase
A few weeks in Seoul, from a semi-basement to a house on a hill and back, broken at the centre by one night of rain
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 132 minutes, in Korean with English words in the dialogue; two households and a third hidden one; one house built as a set
Register
From a comic montage set to a Baroque pastiche to a knife in sunlight at a birthday party; cool daylight above, sodium and fluorescence below
Scale
Three households, one house, the city that falls away beneath it
Governing Proposition
A family in a semi-basement takes, one by one, every post of service in a rich family’s house, and finds that another household already lives beneath it. The wager of the film is that class is a matter of where a body stands, fixed below choice in the body itself, and that a caper can turn into horror and then tragedy at its centre without leaving its house or its logic.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Kims, Ki-taek, his wife Chung-sook and their two children, live in a semi-basement, a banjiha, half below the street. Its window is a slot at ground level that looks out on feet and on a drunk man urinating against the wall. Ki-woo and his sister Ki-jung hunt through the rooms for a neighbour’s Wi-Fi. The family folds pizza boxes for piecework. When the street is fumigated, the smoke comes into the room. The film begins at the bottom of its world, and is funny about it.
A friend, Min-hyuk, comes with a gift for the household, a scholar’s stone, suseok, and offers Ki-woo his post as a tutor in a rich family’s house. The stone and the offer arrive together, and both will be carried, in the end, all the way up to the house on the hill and down again.
Bong Joon-ho made the film in 2019 from a screenplay written with Han Jin-won. It premiered in competition at Cannes on 21 May and won the Palme d’Or, the first Korean film to do so, and in February 2020 it won Best Picture, the first film not in English to win it. Lee Ha-jun built the Park house as a set, Hong Kyung-pyo photographed it, Yang Jin-mo edited it, and Jung Jae-il wrote the music. Song Kang-ho plays Ki-taek. The whole film is a matter of two windows: the slot of the semi-basement, and the glass wall of the house above.
Movement II
The Park house stands at the top of the city, up its own steps. Its living room opens through a glass wall onto a lawn. Ki-woo tutors there, and Ki-jung follows him in as “Jessica”, art therapist to the young son, Da-song. Yeon-kyo, the mother, played by Cho Yeo-jeong with a credulity the film plays straight, believes every word. Da-song draws a figure that Ki-jung explains away with an invented diagnosis. It is a ghost, and he has seen it.
One by one the Kims take every post of service. Ki-jung leaves her underwear in the car so that the driver is dismissed. Ki-taek becomes the driver. The housekeeper, Moon-gwang, is the last obstacle: she is allergic to peaches, and in the sequence known as “The Belt of Faith” the family dusts her with peach fuzz, coaches a phone call and stages a cough until Yeon-kyo believes she has tuberculosis. It is cut to a Baroque pastiche, a montage as exact as a clock. Chung-sook, the mother, becomes the housekeeper.
Dong-ik Park, the father, an IT executive, praises his new driver for never crossing the line, the seon. He means it kindly. The line he values is about to be crossed by something no one in the Kim household can perceive, their smell.
Movement III
The Parks go camping, and the Kims take the house. They drink in the living room before the glass wall, in the rain. Chung-sook says the Parks are nice because they are rich: money is an iron, darimi, and smooths out the creases. Then the doorbell rings. It is Moon-gwang, in the rain, asking to be let in.
She pushes a cabinet aside, and behind it a passage leads down into the dark: a shelter dug beneath the house against an attack from the North, which the Parks do not know exists. Her husband, Geun-sae, lives there, hiding from loan sharks, worshipping a master who has no idea he is there, and tapping out his gratitude in Morse with his head. The caper becomes a horror film at the moment it reveals that another family was below the Kims all along. The two families nearly kill each other for the right to be servants, and Moon-gwang, filming them on her phone, plays a North Korean newsreader with the phone held as a missile button.
The Parks call: the rain has ended their camping, and they are coming home. The Kims force Moon-gwang and Geun-sae back into the bunker and hide. Ki-taek, Ki-woo and Ki-jung lie under the living-room table while Dong-ik, close above them, tells his wife about the driver’s smell, a smell that crosses the line. Ki-taek hears it. Then the three escape from the house into the rain.
Movement IV
They run downhill. Stair after stair, street after street, the city drops and the water deepens, and Jung Jae-il’s music widens over them. The same rain that is a nuisance to the Parks is a flood to the Kims. At the bottom, the semi-basement is under water. Ki-jung sits on the spurting toilet and smokes. The stone floats up in the water, and Ki-woo takes it.
That night they sleep with the other flooded families on the floor of a gymnasium. Ki-woo asks his father what the plan is, and Ki-taek answers with a speech about having no plan, mugyehoek. It says aloud what the flood has already shown, and it is the film’s bleakest statement: the plan to rise has been a fantasy.
In the morning Yeon-kyo calls from a shopping trip. The rain has cleaned the Parks’ sky, and she is giving a birthday party for Da-song in the garden. She needs her driver. Ki-taek, who slept in a gymnasium because his home was under water, drives her through the bright city, and in the car a window is lowered against him.
Movement V
The party is in sunlight on the lawn, with guests and a cake, and Da-song plays at “Indians” with a tent and a headdress. Ki-woo carries the stone down into the bunker, and Geun-sae turns it on him and strikes him with it. Then Geun-sae climbs out into the garden with a knife, before the guests, and stabs Ki-jung. The ghost of Da-song’s drawing stands in the sun.
In the chaos the car keys lie under Geun-sae, who is dying, and Dong-ik reaches for them with his hand to his nose. Ki-taek sees the gesture. He strikes Dong-ik dead, and vanishes. The blow answers a gesture, not an act: a lifetime of being placed, compressed into one movement of a hand toward a face.
Ki-woo survives, after surgery on his brain. The house is sold. He sees a lamp in the house blink in Morse, and understands that his father is beneath it, where Geun-sae lived. He writes a letter that promises a plan: he will make money, buy the house, and bring his father up. The film shows it as if it were happening. Then the camera lowers from the falling snow to the window of the semi-basement.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and cut. The subtractive test finds almost nothing loose, because nearly every object is planted to be paid. The stone is given in the first act, floats up in the flood, is carried to the party and becomes the weapon turned on its bearer. The housekeeper’s expulsion is what sends her back to the doorbell. The Morse code tapped below the house is the code of the epilogue. The boy’s drawing of a “ghost”, dismissed as an invented diagnosis, is true. The line, seon, that the driver must never cross is the line the smell crosses. What gives: the rain that brings the Parks home is a hinge the world supplies too readily, the gymnasium says aloud what the flood has shown, and the epilogue’s voice-over spells out what the image carries.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Class is fixed below the level of choice, in the body: the rich smell the poor, and the poor cannot smell themselves. Dong-ik is not cruel; his kindness and his disgust are one thing, his comfort, and the fatal blow answers a gesture, not an act. The poor fight one another for the space beneath, while above them no one knows the space exists. Decency is bought: money, says Chung-sook, is an iron, darimi, and smooths the creases. The plan to rise by work is shown as fantasy. Much of this is disclosed by what cannot be filmed, a smell shown only in reactions. What holds it below the top: the thesis is legible from the outset and partly spoken, and the rich are seen from outside.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The elevation is dreadful, and it rises in the second half. The descent in the rain: three people running down stair after stair, street after street, the water deepening as the city drops, the music widening over it; it is the film’s height and a true sublime of scale. The bunker revealed, the passage opening into the dark, a man living below the house. The semi-basement flooding, Ki-jung sitting on the spurting toilet to smoke, terror and comedy in one frame. The garden party, a knife in sunlight among guests and cake. The last shot, the camera lowering from the snow to the window. Held below by frequency and register: the first hour is a comic caper, brilliant and level, and the party’s climax trades height for shock.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built into the architecture, and it bears the load. The house is a three-storeyed cosmos: the sunlit upper world, the servants’ middle ground of kitchen and stair, and an underworld beneath it, dug as a shelter against the North, where a man lives in the dark and worships his unknowing host, a ghost to the child who sees him. The film’s movements obey that cosmos: the climb, the discovery of the lower world, the flood as a deluge falling only on those below, the descent down the city’s stairs as a katabasis. The stone is a talisman that becomes a burden and a weapon, and is returned to the stream. What holds it from the top is the satirist’s wink: Ki-woo calls the stone sangjingjeok, “symbolic”, and the archetypes serve a social argument.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance: Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960), the intruder in a house of stairs; the servant films of Losey (The Servant, 1963) and Chabrol (La Cérémonie, 1995); the con-artist caper; the genre-mixing Korean cinema of the 2000s. The turn is in two places. The caper changes genre at the doorbell, into horror and then tragedy, without leaving its house or its logic, and the change is the argument: the film pulls its own floor away and is stronger for it. And the servant film’s struggle of servant against master becomes poor against poor, with the rich as bystanders. The stake is held down by precedent: tonal fusion was Bong’s proven path (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother), and Snowpiercer (2013) had laid the class allegory out horizontally.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is spatial and the form is architecture: stairs up to the Parks, stairs down to the semi-basement, stairs down again to the bunker, so that rank is always where a body stands in the frame. The Parks’ glass wall opens on a lawn; the Kims’ street-level window opens on feet and a drunk man urinating. The change of genre is itself the instrument: the caper assumes the Kims can rise, and the horror discovers a family already below them. And the central sense, smell, cannot be filmed; it is shown only in reactions, a wrinkled nose, a lowered window, so the viewer is placed as the Kims are. Held off the top by the epilogue’s voice-over and a climax in a thriller’s ordinary grammar.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise, and seven years supply little of it, so the figure is a forecast. The return already yields: the planted objects read differently once known; the question of who the parasite is, the Kims, the man below or the Parks living on the labour of others, stays open and is argued; the lines that divide the frame, the parody of North Korean broadcasts, the “Indian” motif in the garden and the epilogue as fantasy or plan have produced a large reading in a short time. Formally, the blocking on the stairs and the staging of the infiltration can be studied at length. Against it: the film is built to be legible on first viewing, its symbols are partly announced, and a plot of plants and payoffs closes when solved.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 2010s and early 2020s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: a social allegory made to work as an exact popular thriller, changing genre at its centre without losing its audience; real, and a perfection of Bong’s method more than a reorganisation of possibility. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is unusually large for seven years, and of an unusual kind. The first film not in English to win Best Picture changed what American distribution and awards would admit, and the film stands at the head of a wave of class satires in which the rich are a household and the poor work inside it (Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Saltburn). The limit stands: the reach outruns the force, much of it is industrial, and seven years are discounted.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Seven years, and survival can only be weighed on what seven years show, which against centuries is very little; that is what holds the axis lowest. The film survives whole as released. There is no loss of version, and the later black-and-white version is an addition to its life, not a repair. Presence is as wide as a film of its decade has had: worldwide release, the Palme d’Or and Best Picture, continuous circulation on home video and streaming, use in classrooms. Wide presence earns a little and is given. The surface is partly fixed to its moment: smartphones and group chats, Wi-Fi borrowed from a neighbour, a delivery-pizza franchise, a Taiwanese castella shop as a bubble that burst. The semi-basement, banjiha, reads as record rather than period.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making is load-bearing throughout. Lee Ha-jun’s house is built for the camera, its stair, glass and garden designed as the film’s argument. Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography sets the cool daylight of the upper house against the sodium and fluorescence below, and the flood is shot in a tank of the built street. The cutting of “The Belt of Faith”, where the housekeeper’s removal is a montage of peach fuzz, a coached phone call and a staged cough set to Jung Jae-il’s Baroque pastiche, is as exact as anything in the decade’s cinema. Song Kang-ho tightens slowly across the film; Lee Jung-eun changes at the doorbell. The costs: the rain and the sale of the house are mechanics showing, and the party is staged more for impact than clarity.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comic montage of the peach and the staged cough, and the knife at the birthday party. One law governs both: position. Everyone is placed above or below, everyone performs for those above, and the Kims’ method of rising, mimicry and the planted lie, is the method that brings them down: the lie about the housekeeper creates the hostage who returns, and the performance of the servant ends in the servant’s blow. The comic signals persist into the horror, a newsreader routine played in the bunker with a phone held as a missile button. The range is wide, slapstick to tragedy, and the law holds across it. The strain: Ki-taek’s blow arrives faster than the man the film has built, and the epilogue’s dream is told in a new register.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The orders held: the family, in three households, one hidden; labour, which places every character, tutor, therapist, driver, housekeeper, an architect’s house, an executive, pizza boxes, a failed castella shop; class and the economy, at the centre; the city, vertical Seoul in rain and flood, the shelter in a gymnasium; the body, in smell and injury; consciousness, in Ki-taek’s humiliation and Ki-woo’s fantasy; nature, as the rain that cleans the Parks’ sky and floods the Kims’ street; the state and history, in a bunker dug against North Korea and debts to loan sharks; and a sacred, in one man’s worship of his host. They are held in one structure, the house. Held at its figure because history and the state are glimpsed and not entered, the Parks have no inner life, and the field is one city.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Made at 9.0. A disclosure about class fixed in the body, the poor fighting one another for the space beneath, and decency bought, that can be stated and holds; a myth of upper world, middle ground and underworld built into the house itself; a form of stairs and windows in which rank is where a body stands, and a change of genre that is the discovery of the floor; and a making in which set, light, cutting and ensemble carry every scene.
Limiting Dimension
The Imperishable at 7.9: the film survives whole and has had the widest presence of its decade, but seven years show very little against centuries, and part of its surface is fixed to its moment. Above it, The Encompassed at 8.0, where the state and history are glimpsed and the Parks have no inner life, and The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 8.4, an elevation that is mostly dread and comes late, and a return that is so far forecast rather than shown.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on four of five: The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable at 7.9 falls six tenths short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. The work is held below the summit by one condition, The Imperishable at 7.9 against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Parasite (Gisaengchung) as released in 2019, the colour theatrical version of 132 minutes, in Korean with English words in the dialogue, from the semi-basement window to the semi-basement window: directed by Bong Joon-ho from a screenplay by Bong and Han Jin-won, on a story by Bong, produced by Barunson E&A and distributed by CJ Entertainment, photographed by Hong Kyung-pyo, edited by Yang Jin-mo, designed by Lee Ha-jun, with music by Jung Jae-il. The black-and-white version made later under the director’s supervision is not the object and is weighed only as part of the film’s life. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Korean film, and the shortfall of any subtitle is not charged to it. Exact Korean wording is held with certainty only for a few words, so the dialogue is described, with the Korean word given where it is certain and the English rendering beneath it the desk’s own. Figures that could not be verified, among them the budget, the box-office returns, the scene timings, the shot counts and the share of the dialogue, are not given.