Parasite

The Ki-taek family and life in the semi-basement

The story begins in Seoul, South Korea, where the Ki-taek family (played by Song Kang-ho) scrapes by in a tiny semi-basement apartment known in Korean as a banjiha. The home—damp and barely lit—sits below street level, its windows looking directly out onto the sidewalk and the feet of passersby. The family has four members: Ki-taek, the unemployed father with no clear prospects; Chung-sook (Jo Yeo-jeong), his equally unemployed wife; their eldest son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), a bright young man who has failed the university entrance exam several times; and their daughter, Ki-jung (Park So-dam), talented and cunning, with self-taught skills in graphic design and document forgery.

The family survives by doing precarious work—such as folding pizza boxes for a delivery company—and by piggybacking on the Wi-Fi signals of nearby businesses. Their financial hardship is total and structural: this is not a temporary crisis but a chronic situation in which none of the four family members has managed to secure stable formal employment. Even so, their family life is close and warm, defined by collective resourcefulness and a mutual understanding that will become the foundation of their future schemes.

The inciting event: an opportunity at the Park household

This fragile equilibrium is shattered when a friend of Ki-woo's named Min-hyuk visits the semi-basement before leaving the country to study abroad. Min-hyuk proposes that Ki-woo take over his role as the English tutor for Da-hye (Jung Ziso), the teenage daughter of the wealthy Park family. Since Ki-woo lacks the academic credentials required for the position, Ki-jung skillfully forges a university certificate accrediting him as a student at a prestigious institution. Document in hand, Ki-woo presents himself at the Parks' luxurious mansion—designed by the celebrated architect Namgoong Hyeonja and located in an upscale residential area of Seoul.

The Park family is headed by Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun), a successful company director who is cold and aloof with those who work for him, though superficially polite and condescending. His wife, Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), is a naïve, credulous woman who is easily manipulated and entirely removed from the economic realities faced by most of the population. Their daughter Da-hye becomes Ki-woo's student, and he soon begins to develop a romantic attraction toward her. The Parks' young son, Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun), is an eccentric child with a passion for primitive art who, years earlier, witnessed something traumatic in the house's basement—an event that apparently left him with lasting psychological effects.

The systematic infiltration and the central conflict

Once inside the mansion, Ki-woo sets a methodical family infiltration plan in motion. He persuades Yeon-kyo to hire Ki-jung as an art therapist for Da-song, presenting her under the false name "Jessica" and with equally fabricated credentials. Ki-jung's flawless performance quickly wins the trust of Mrs. Park. The family then schemes to place Ki-taek as Dong-ik's chauffeur, which requires getting rid of the previous driver, Yoon (Park Keun-rok). Ki-jung plants false evidence in Mr. Park's car to imply that Yoon had been having sex in the vehicle, triggering his immediate dismissal. Ki-taek takes his place.

The plan is finally completed with the addition of Chung-sook as the new housekeeper, after the family maneuvers to have Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun)—the domestic worker who has served the Parks for years—dismissed through a false accusation of tuberculosis. With all four members of the Ki-taek family embedded in the Parks' household staff under fictitious identities and fabricated relationships—their employers unaware they are even related—the scheme appears to have worked perfectly.

The film's central conflict is thus established as a class tension sustained by a collective lie: a family with no resources that has parasitized the comfort ecosystem of a wealthy family, occupying their spaces, consuming their goods, and reshaping their daily life. Yet the situation contains the seeds of its own undoing, as the truth about the hidden identities, the house, and its darkest secrets threatens to surface at any moment.