Hot take: Parasite is about Class War but not in the way most people think. The protagonist family is not actually the stand-in for the working class, it is instead the housekeeper and her indebted husband who live in the basement. The Kim family live on the sub-basement but they have a window out. The Parks live in a windowed mansion at the top of the hill overlooking the city.

That window out is a devil, constantly tempting the Kims with allures of a nice home and higher education credentials and a rich wife. The young Kim son with brain damage returns back to the window longingly at the end, a sign he did not learn anything and is stuck in his delusion of class mobility.

The Kims aren’t the down and out underdog, they are the middle dog. They constantly punch down and betray class solidarity with those below them, scrambling over their corpses and stolen jobs in an attempt to make it themselves and also become higher class.

The fate of the Kim family was sealed the moment they refused solidarity to the housekeeper after getting her fired, they threatened to call the cops and turn them in. The basement family begs for solidarity, even calling Mrs. Kim “sister” but is returned with violence.

The movie isn’t about the evils of rich people, or even the evils that a capitalist system forces on us. It’s a warning parable about what happens when you scab and act as comprador, mutual ruination