Great story; outstanding screenplay

Rating: 9/10 (25 February 2020)

**Spoiler alert**
Winning an Oscar despite being a foreign language film is remarkable. Inspired by the Oscar win and the surrounding publicity if you watch the trailer, it will intrigue you enough to feel an urgency for watching the movie.
That this is a class war movie will be evident by then. That there is a parasite central to the story is implied too but who preys on whom is still subject to interpretation or is at least a twisted discovery you make as the story unravels.
There is a rich family, gullible & nice but also self-centered and afflicted with class divide enough to dominate everyday decisions in their high-ground lives.
There is a poor family struggling for food and shelter in their below the ground apartment life and yet reveling in their laziness and short term merry making of whatever bounty they can get from odd jobs.
When an opportunity comes knocking, promising an easy way of pulling them out of their pit, they pursue it full throttle morality and legalities be damned.
The momentum of their success builds up for a while and descend begins as they encounter a secret and fraud of another kind threatening their new found prosperity.
As they discover people like themselves who have stakes in uncovering their frauds, they have to win the fight to not slip back to their below the ground existence. The unfolding of surrounding events also leads to a realization that the idea of their affluence is also just a mirage. After all the stench of the basement remains in them and rich people will forever pinch their nose in disgust as their stench wafts through the rich people's perfumed houses.
There is a moment of irony too when a few hours after they had savored the rainfall as they lay usurping the living room of their bosses and pretending that they belonged their after all, they realize that unknown to them the same heavy rain had filled up their basement house with dirty sewer water, destroying their belongings and rendering them homeless in real life.
The pretense of being rich as a part of their rich bosses life suddenly becomes exhausting and together with the chaos of meeting their possible nemesis shocks them out of their reveries of affluence, shatters all their future planning and leads to a complete meltdown a day later.
The final scene plays out amidst an ominous setting. The feeling about an impending tragedy is strong. It still manages to be darkly-funny as Geun-Sey plays out his murderous streak with a comical frenzy.
The movie won an Oscar for original screenplay and is as much a masterpiece as implied by that accolade. It talks literally and metaphorically about the chasms in the society and leaves the viewers to decide if there are any heroes or villains at all.
The movie shows self-imposed helplessness that poverty brings along, how the urge to come out of its grips fast and easy often pushes people further in to its throes. That the need for escapism is so strong that precious reality is lost and often the only way out through education, a steady job is completely lost.
Ki-Woo often promises himself and others about the rightful things he will do and achieve, but often leaves it to a later day. At present he is too busy forging the documents, fencing off his day to day struggles or later, longing for the good days that happened, and this is likely to be his way of life throughout in the absence of any supportive surrounding.
That is also how the movie ends, with a promise by him which he is sure to never fulfill and so the longing, the aspirations, the needs will remain along with the helplessness of never quiet achieving them.
The parasite in the meantime could either be the one who had resigned to an underground life living off the bounty stolen from his rich savior as long as he lived, or the one who is still alive and hiding in the same underground hell albeit with a hope of one day coming out of it.
Or it could be both of them or all the poor men in a hurry to attach their woeful life to those better off around them and be like parasites by the awful choices they make or maybe as a natural order of things or a bit of both.