Edition note: Complete English edition based on the Chinese original; full-film spoilers. Dialogue is independently translated, not quoted from official subtitles.

The Forged Document

Ki-woo is about to apply for a tutoring job with the Parks. He has no university diploma. His younger sister Ki-jung makes him a certificate of enrollment at Yonsei University on her computer. It looks convincing, down to the embossed seal. Once scanned, it gives nothing away.

Their mother stands nearby, a little uneasy, and asks whether this is all right. Holding the sheet, Ki-woo says he will definitely get into Yonsei next year, so he is simply receiving it ahead of time. He speaks calmly. He is not scrambling for an excuse.

The line is usually taken as a joke, or as evidence of his shamelessness. It is something else. This man has found a place for his action within an explanation that makes sense, and he believes it himself. When he finishes speaking, he puts the paper in his bag.

From inside his own square, this is how it works: he has taken the university entrance examination four times and narrowly missed out each time; he can teach this student well; all he lacks is a piece of paper, and sooner or later he will have it. By that reckoning, forgery brings a date forward. It does not falsify the thing itself.

The film gives almost everyone a reason we can understand. Every action has a path leading to it when seen from the square of the person performing it. But having reasons does not make anyone innocent. A choice can be understandable and still do real harm to another person. The film's power comes precisely from refusing to let the label “bad person” do our judging for us.

Ki-jung's Method

Ki-jung takes a more ruthless route into the Parks' home. She invents an identity and an account of art therapy, speaking fluently about its terminology and methods. She even improvises a professional-sounding term on the spot. Mrs. Park is immediately convinced.

One thing matters here: the explanation is invented, but what she does is real. Mrs. Park's greatest worry is her younger son, Da-song. His drawings are chaotic, he cannot sit still, and several previous teachers have failed to manage him. Once Ki-jung takes over, he really does settle down.

She has a precise sense of how to handle him. She does not coax or indulge him. In the very first lesson she sets a firm pace, and that is what makes him follow her lead. A con cannot counterfeit this. It is something she already knows how to do.

The only thing she does not have is a piece of paper proving it. The film never explains how she learned, nor does it supply a résumé of neglected talent. It simply shows that she has real ability, yet needs an invented identity before anyone will believe in it.

So she makes herself a credential. The act cannot be defended morally. Within her square, though, it addresses a real mismatch: she has the ability but not the credentials, and this market recognizes only credentials.

The Two People They Drive Out

The two ugliest things this family does are to get rid of the existing driver and housekeeper. Both acts need to be described fully. Otherwise this essay will turn into a defense of the Kims.

To remove the driver, they use a pair of panties. Ki-jung leaves them on the back seat. She does not have to say a word. Mrs. Park reaches the conclusion herself.

To remove the housekeeper, they use peaches. Knowing that Moon-gwang is allergic to peach fuzz, they scatter it on her to make her cough. Step by step, they lead Mrs. Park toward the idea of tuberculosis, until the employers themselves pronounce the dismissal.

Both methods are dirty. The plans are meticulous, each move fitting into the next, the execution steady. Afterward, nobody shows a trace of shame. That evening they eat and drink at their celebration as though nothing has happened.

Their motive is easy enough to understand: they need four jobs, and these two people occupy two of the positions. Yet this is exactly where they must be held accountable. To enter those positions, they deliberately recast two particular people as obstacles that can be moved aside. Not hating them does not undo the harm.

The family does briefly think about the people it has driven out. Ki-taek once asks whether the former driver has found another job. Father and son reassure themselves with the supposition that he is young and will surely find something better, before Ki-jung brings the conversation back to their own family. They do not keep asking or establish what harm they have caused. What becomes of those two people briefly enters their square, then is excluded again. A passing thought does not absolve them. This is a form of moral blindness the film puts before us: once the immediate problem is solved, the people outside it no longer need to be asked about.

Mr. Park

To describe Mr. Park clearly, we first have to set aside an expectation audiences bring into the cinema: a story of this kind ought to have a repulsive rich man.

He is not marked out as a villain by insults delivered to people's faces or by withheld wages. His power is more ordinary than that. He can decide how far other people must keep from him without needing to know anything about their lives.

He speaks politely to Ki-taek and has even praised him: this driver understands the limits and never crosses the line. In his mouth, it is sincere praise, not a warning.

He has a gentle side within his family. He arranges a party especially for his younger son's birthday and joins in a scene of playing Indians. The film does not need a scandal in his private life to establish the problem. What it asks us to see is precisely the asymmetry that a “respectable employer” can also sustain.

His one harsh remark is made behind someone's back. Sitting on his own sofa, he tells his wife that the driver has a particular smell, and that the smell crosses the line. He does not know that, as he speaks, the family is lying beneath the coffee table.

This is the film's most devastating scene, and its shape is this: the harshest words are spoken when he thinks he is among his own people. Within his square, nobody else is in the room at that moment. So for him it is not an insult, only a private remark.

The next essay will take this further. For now, let us record just one thing: he has never humiliated anyone to their face. Not once, from beginning to end.

Mrs. Park, and Ki-taek's Remark

Mrs. Park is the easiest person in the house to deceive. She is trusting, accommodating, generous with money, excessively anxious about the children, and unwilling to hire anyone without a personal recommendation. The family deceives her from beginning to end without once arousing her suspicion.

The film's judgment of her comes from the Kims themselves. On the day the four of them drink in their employers' living room, Chung-sook says she is kind, then corrects herself: she is not kind despite being rich; she is kind because she is rich. Ki-taek adds that if he had that much money, he would be very kind too.

This is the film's harshest judgment of the Parks, and it comes from the poor themselves, spoken with laughter rather than accusation. There is no hatred in it. It names something cold: in that house, kindness is cheap. Anyone who lives there can afford it.

A few hours later, the people saying this will fight two other poor people in the very same house. The film places the two moments close together. Only a spell of rain lies between them.

The point here is not irony. She is not being hypocritical. She genuinely believes the world is broadly good, and the years she has lived have seldom overturned that judgment. Her goodwill is real. So is the fact that she does not have to see the life beyond it.

The Two in the Basement

Moon-gwang is the former housekeeper. She has worked in the house since the previous owner's time, arriving before the Parks. After being driven out, she returns one rainy night and knocks on the door, saying she has left something in the basement.

Her husband Geun-sae lives down there. For years he has hidden beneath the house from his creditors, surviving on the meals she brings him every day. This has continued for several years, through two successive owners, without ever being discovered.

We need to give this its proper weight: it is the longest sustained act of care in the film. One person brings another food and water and cleans up for him, every day for years, without missing a day. Every day, too, she has to conceal it from her employers.

Everything she does afterward is ugly: she cries, kneels, films a video to use as a threat. Driven into a corner, she will do anything, and her words grow harsher and harsher. Yet what she protects, from beginning to end, is one particular person.

Geun-sae's side is stranger still. Living in the basement, he bows each day toward the rooms above and thanks Mr. Park, saying that Mr. Park feeds him and gives him somewhere to live. Mr. Park does not know that a man lives beneath his house.

Finding a Bad Person Is Still Not Enough

The two most common readings of this film say, respectively, that the rich are hypocritical and the poor are cunning. They seem to point in opposite directions, but they perform the same operation: identify a category of people and put all the responsibility inside it, as though the remaining structure no longer needed to be examined.

Take the first reading. The Parks' manners and family affection need not be an act. But genuine courtesy does not amount to equality. A person can refrain from humiliating an employee to their face while never having to bring that employee's life within his own field of vision.

The remark about the smell does not tear away a layer of false politeness. It is a private remark made at home. Precisely because it is not intended as a face-to-face humiliation, it reveals all the more clearly a boundary of rank that has long since been internalized.

Now take the second. Merely calling the poor cunning leaves out the circumstances of four unemployed people folding pizza boxes in a semi-basement. Yet recognizing those circumstances does not allow us to describe forgery, framing people, and deciding on someone else's loss of employment as harmless acts of self-rescue.

Both readings can find a few details to support them. Neither can carry the whole film. The film does not say that nobody does wrong. It says that each person sees necessity only from within their own circumstances, so that one person's way of staying alive can easily become another person's loss outside the frame.

Responsibility and structure must therefore both remain in view. The Kims are responsible for their methods; the Parks live with the advantage of not needing to know about other people. Even if every individual's responsibility were fully accounted for, those scarce positions and those spaces descending level after level would go on producing conflict.

Beneath the Coffee Table

Rain cuts short the owners' camping trip, and they return unexpectedly. The four Kims are drinking in the living room. Hearing the car, they panic and hide beneath the coffee table.

On the sofa above them, Mr. Park and his wife talk about the driver's smell. Three people lie on the floor listening. Ki-taek's face is turned toward the floorboards, expressionless.

The two on the sofa are having a private conversation in their own home, unaware that the person they are discussing is at their feet. The four on the floor hide there with their earlier deceptions behind them. For now, they are waiting only for a chance to crawl out.

Each immediate action of these six people has a reason within its own limited view, but nobody has the complete picture. The rain grows heavier. Once the two have fallen asleep, the four emerge from beneath the table, crawl across the living room close to the floor, and slip out through the door one by one. Nobody makes a sound.

Outside, the rain has already filled half the city. They walk home down one flight of steps after another. They walk for a long time. The way grows narrower as they go, until at last they walk into the water.

This essay concerns the 2019 theatrical color release, approximately 132 minutes long. A black-and-white version also exists and is not discussed here. The Chinese original consistently uses 基婷 rather than the alternative 基静 for the sister's name; this English version uses Ki-jung.