This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
ScreeningNotes’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
Quick expansion/clarification of an idea from my original, more thorough review:
So we know what the Park family are being punished for by the cinematic violence done to them (they're rich, they're the parasite), but what did the poor Kim family do to deserve their punishment? Why does Kim Ki-taek end up in the basement, presumably forever? We can find a clue in the meaning of their last name: "Kim" means gold, and while the Kim family starts with little to no wealth, once they get a taste for it they become greedy for more, and as is made clear in the scene where they get drunk in the Park house while the family is out, they would be happy living this bourgeois lifestyle. The Kim family is punished for being class traitors.
(Bong Joon-ho does this thing in most of his movies where he begins with essentially sympathetic protagonists and then problematizes their position, the clearest example being the detectives in Memories of Murder, who are trying to solve a case of serial rape but who use violent torture methods on someone with a mental disability. I think the only one of his films I've seen without this complexity of its protagonist is Okja?)
