Parasite

Buddhist cosmology describes six realms into which beings are born depending on karma: hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, demigods, gods. The realms are not metaphors. They are operational descriptions of consciousness conditions a being can find itself in. Most beings cycle through them without awareness that the cycle is occurring.

Parasite is a six-realms film with the realms made architectural. The sub-basement is hell — Geun-sae has been there for years, feeding off scraps, banging morse code into the wall, his consciousness reduced to gratitude for the man whose house imprisons him. The semi-basement is the realm of hungry ghosts — the Kims live half-underground, exposed to drunks pissing on their window, watching their phones die when the neighbor's Wi-Fi gets a password. The ground floor of the Park house is the realm of gods — clean, lit, with a perfect lawn, designed by an architect named Namgoong who has cultivated the home as a Pure Land.

Bong's camera moves between these realms with brutal precision. Stairs are not stairs. They are the apparatus of karmic transition. The Kims ascend stairs to enter the Park house. They descend many more stairs to flee back to their flooded basement. The previous housekeeper descends the secret stairs to feed her husband. The night of the flood, every realm is shown in its proper relation: gods asleep in clean beds, hungry ghosts watching their possessions float by, hell beings drowning in sewage.

The realms do not communicate. Mr. Park cannot smell what the Kims smell because he has never lived where the smell exists. Geun-sae thanks Mr. Park as his god, having no information about who Mr. Park actually is. The Kims, between, see all the realms and cannot inhabit any of them stably. They are the bardo-state in the film. Their existence is unstable because they are in transit between conditions that are themselves stable.

The film's most precise device is the smell. The Park family notices it. They cannot place it. They describe it among themselves: it is the smell of subway, of old radish, of something the rich do not encounter and the poor cannot wash off because the smell is from the apartment, not the body. The Kims discover that no shampoo can defeat it. The smell follows them up.

This is karma in its most operational sense. Karma is not punishment. Karma is the trace condition of action — the residue that a being carries from its history, regardless of intention or effort, until it is finally exhausted through skillful action and patience. The Kims have generations of basement karma. Their semi-basement is the inheritance, not a temporary station.

Mr. Park's recoil from the smell at the climactic moment — flinching as he reaches over the dying Geun-sae's body for the car keys — is what triggers the murder. Ki-taek sees the flinch. He has been performing for the Park family for months. The flinch tells him that no performance will ever be enough. The smell cannot be performed away. The realm is not exit-able through service or competence or even strategic identity theft.

He kills Mr. Park not because Mr. Park is the worst man in the film — he is not. Mr. Park is, by his own lights, decent. Ki-taek kills him because the flinch contained an entire cosmology. The cosmology is real. The murder is karmic reaction in a moment of clarity. Bong does not excuse it. He shows how exactly it happens.

Ki-woo is given a scholar's stone by his friend at the start of the film. He carries it with him. He insists it is meaningful. He brings it into the Park house. He carries it into the basement on the night of the flood. He tries to use it as a weapon. The basement-dweller takes it from him and uses it to crack his skull.

The stone is desire. It is the literalization of attachment — heavy, prized, useless. Ki-woo wants it to be a talisman of upward mobility. The film keeps showing it as what it is: a rock. By the time it is used to assault him, the film has demonstrated what every Buddhist text says about attachment. The thing you cling to in order to ascend is the thing that will be picked up by reality to break your head.

After Ki-woo wakes from the coma, he returns the stone to the stream. This is the closest the film comes to a moment of genuine renunciation. He sets it down. He lets the water carry it. He lets go.

But Bong does not give him the consolation prize. The next scene is the fantasy of buying the house, freeing his father, walking up the steps. The fantasy is precise. It includes architecture, weather, the exact gesture of embrace. And then the film cuts back to Ki-woo in the semi-basement, writing the letter that contains the fantasy. He has set the stone down. He has not set down what the stone was a symbol of. The cycle is reasserting itself in a finer register, as the new ambition that will keep him bound for another lifetime, and another after that.

This is the most precise depiction of how samsara actually operates available in popular cinema. Liberation is not refusing one object of desire. Liberation is recognizing that the structure of desiring is the trap, regardless of what you happen to be desiring on a given day.