This post contains extensive spoilers for the film PARASITE.

There is a constant tension in his latest movie PARASITE for a big reveal. The film, which is about a poor family scamming their way into service jobs for a wealthy family, has the feeling of a horror film in its cinematography and use of mystery. Director Bong Joon-Ho works in genre and the name PARASITE echoes the name of his monster movie, THE HOST. Surely, there’s something sinister in the basement of this luxurious, opulent house. Surely, the elite upper class family that rules over our protagonists have done something evil, perhaps even occult, to obtain their fabulous wealth.

No such reveal comes in the film. There are certainly twists in the story and it is unpredictable to the very end, but you will never find out that an alien brain slug has taken up residence in the bodies of the wealthy family. You will not find that the house was built on ancient cursed burial grounds. The Parks, it turns out, are just very well off and concern themselves mostly with the inconveniences of their world.

In fact, most of the evil acts in the film are committed by the underclass. Our protagonist family, the impoverished Kims, do most of the film’s sins. In their initial striving to make it out of the underbelly of Seoul, they scheme, con and sabotage. They do not exercise any class solidarity. When their backs are against the wall, and they are threatened with exposure, their survival instincts kick in and they delve into violence. Knowing this, some people might believe PARASITE presents a “both sides” political lesson with regards to the haves and the have-nots.

But it’s not a lesson about whether rich people are nice (Of course they’re nice, it’s easy to be nice when you’re rich, declares the matriarch of the family, Kim Chung-Took.) The lesson is about what the wealth gap does to people and their humanity. In our protagonists, it twists a lovable scamp archetype into desperate and ultimately hesitant purveyors of violence. In the nice enough wealthy elites, it turns them into oblivious and disconnected to the dire situation around them. A huge storm is a great blessing to clear away the clouds the next day for the Parks. It represents the loss of everything they own to the Kims.

This is a more valuable insight into the effects of capitalism than making the Parks an occult monster. That type of story only tells audiences that the wealthy upper class is only bad when they take it too far — meaning, when they engage in some supernatural comic book evil. But here, The Parks are extremely realistic. The patriarch is some banal tech company executive. His wife, a little bit gullible, but ultimately polite. Still, it’s their obliviousness to the despair in the pillars that hold up their lives that makes them bad — and their unwillingness to know. Their service employees, and really the entire service industry, is just a tool that sands off the remaining rough edges of their luxurious life. It’s not hard to find that kind of household in every developed nation on Earth. They may not spit on the help, but their lives are surely not of great concern to them. They just benefit from it.

At the end of the film, Kim Ki-Taek, the father of the house of scammers, sees how his wealthy counterpart reacts when his back is against the wall. They take care of their own. They expect the underclass to take of them as well. In an unrelated gesture, the wealthy man covers his nose as he grabs his car keys to make his escape from imminent danger, and every indignation that Kim Ki-Taek has had to endure comes back to him all at once. Every unsaid slight and implied disrespect comes to him at that moment, when he’s already lost everything in his world, and finally at the bottom of this well he takes up a cathartic act of revenge. Not on this particular wealthy man, but on a lifetime of indignity wrought by the class system.

This is what the wealth gap and a complete lack of economic mobility does to people. It twists the underclass into darker versions of themselves, and the elites can only be perplexed as to why it happened. To them, they were just having a beautiful garden party when a crazy homeless man attacked them. To the beholder, the down trodden of the world decided to make their last act a swing against something, anything, that might be related to their lifelong pain.

PARASITE closes on the protagonist son, Kim Ki-Woo, penning a secret letter to his father who is (through a convoluted but poetic series of events) now trapped in the sub-basement of the opulent house. He promises and envisions (tricking the audience for a moment) that he will go to university, make a ton of money, buy that dream house, and finally free his father. But here in the real world, we know the truth. If it were that easy, he would have done it already. If the society afforded him that kind of path, he would have taken it. But it has more to gain from squeezing him and his class, from grinding out whatever meager box-folding services they can for as little capital as possible. The tragic ending sees Kim Ki-Woo striving for dreams of “making it” to give his family a modicum of freedom, and we are left with a familiar sense of striving and doom.