As far as I could tell in the movie the rich people were depicted as decent parents if not a bit naive, while the poor family were backstabbing assholes who betrayed their fellow workers (the housekeeper and her husband) because of sheer malice. Not once does the film hint at the underlying economical system as the reason why the rich are rich and the poor are poor.
If you are a socialist, you will (correctly) identify capitalism as the reason for the misery of the poor people in the film, and the rich as part of the bourgeoisie who exploit them. But that isn't any different than analysing an IRL crime through that lens, the film didn't help you reach that conclusion, it just presented a scenario.
A chud could easily see the rich family as the honest entrepreneurs and the poor family as poor because of the negative behaviors they exhibited, and there is nothing in the film that would dispute that interpretation.
With the poor family getting punished for their deception, and the son resolving to make money to save his father at the end (presumably through more "honest" means), it even displays the "pull yourself by the bootstraps" belief.
The best case interpretation of the film I can make is that "the rich people should be more conscious of the poor's struggles, and the poors should stay in their place or risk losing everything" which is pretty reactionary and not the class conscious film many people described it as. I guess you could see the ending as punishment for the class betrayal but I think that's a stretch.
Am I overzealous in policing the politics of the media I consume to the point of misinterpreting things or finding an even vaguely leftist film that hard?
I think it's a mistake to read the story as a straightforward allegory, but overall I think its politics are good. For better or worse, this is not a Socialist Realist movie, but rather one that is playing with complexity and ambiguity.
Actually it very much does, although some of the context is harder to parse if you're not familiar with Korean society. The poor family ended up in their situation because the father dumped their savings in to a fad restaurant too late to cash in on the trend and got ruined. The brother, while intelligent, lacks the elite credentials his friend has, until his sister forges a diploma from Yonsei University (this is one of the universities you are desperate to get into if you want to stay on the elite track that leads to employment at a conglomerate like Samsung). There is a very narrow track to success in Korea and it's a lot easier to walk if the way is greased by money and private tutors like the wealthy family has.
Chuds are famously bad at interpretation. But we here should be able to realize that the poor are rarely model victims. The rich family are able to be polite and nice because of their money. The poor family not only do what it takes to survive, but lacking class consciousness, are mostly concerned with becoming rich themselves. That's realistic as hell in my experience. Upon finding out there's someone even more exploited than themselves (the couple in the basement), they're mostly concerned with maintaining their own upward trajectory and are willing to use violence to maintain it. You could read the basement couple as a metaphor for the third world if you were so inclined.
I don't think the text really supports this reading. The idea that the (now brain-damaged) son's fantasy of becoming rich is a realistic one is laughable. If anything I think it's critiquing a bootstraps mentality.
Finally, I want to touch on the movie's critique of the way in which the Korean elite are colonized by America. The wealthy family (particularly the mother) constantly use English words to show their sophistication. Their son is obsessed with cowboys and Indians, and it's the wealthy father's insistence that the poor father wear the Native American headdress that triggers the violent denouement of the movie.
Thanks for the cultural context, I legit didn't know any of that. The cultural colonization thing was actually one of the things I really liked in the movie. My negative view of the movie is probably due to personal taste tbh, I just don't like doomer media and think they do more harm than good in the agitation sense. I also don't really care about subjectivity that much (autism makes this worse probably)
The only part of Parasite I took issue with was the weird dreamlike ending. Hadn't connected the dots that it was probably tongue in cheek as the son was brain damaged at that point.