The most startling thing about Parasite is that, unlike Snowpiercer and Okja, it doesn't have a throughline allegorical message with a 1-to-1 match of coherent moral meaning to every single action its characters do. This is major, a total pivot shift, from an incredible director who sees the way the tide is turning and wants out. Bong Joon-ho sits upon his mountain and surveys The State of Cinema and the Way Things Are Heading where lazy directors reduce filmmaking to moralizing without any of the hidden ambiguity that makes that moralizing so good and true, and says, fuck it, there's no better time than now to make a movie that is so over-the-top, so actually meaningful, and this is the most important part, a movie that is built on the tension between the insanity and the ambiguity that is so real and truly ambiguous that you cannot reduce it to that word "ambiguous". He knew he could do it, the only thing is, in the ravaged hellhole that cinema is now, would people get it? He knew he was right, and it seems like everyone else knows it, too. Whether the people who awarded him the Palme knew this or not, and whether you know this or not, this is why you like Parasite.
The best filmmakers know that exaggeration is the best way to the truth, but Bong does something insane and so hard to pull off here by folding in the fuck-ups and hypocrisies and the cognitive dissonance into the bombastic narrative, and not in a way that feels like it's tricking you, like it's pulling the wool over your eyes for the sake of an ultimate "message", besides the most important one, that family is the most important thing any of us will ever have. You cannot chalk the actions of the Kim family up to "being poor makes you act in shitty ways". I won't let you. Each person in the Kim family is their own person and Bong Joon-ho refuses to let you collapse human behavior into "psychology" caused by "structural problems". But everyone will anyway, because that's how we view movies now, because people aren't people anymore, they are bodies in a space and the space is in a structure. Reading some of the big-name reviews of this movie made me sick.
Anyway, this is true for the other side, too. Have any of you actually met and talked to a rich person and really thought they were the evil cartoon character they are in your head at first? The Park family are not evil cartoon characters. They're stupid and clueless about the way they treat the people that serve them, so benign in the way they don't even view their servants as human until they aren't. They are, yes, parasites who get those dirty rag-smelling people to do what they don't even realize they think they are above doing, and hate them for their hard work, really and truly hate them, and again don't even realize it because they think the money smooths out the creases. It did for them, why not for the help? And then they're surprised that we make them into evil cartoon characters.