Parasite: Plot, Cast, Ending & Where to Watch

Song Kang-ho

Song Kang-ho underplays Ki-taek almost to vanishing — slumped shoulders, a soft-edged smile, the steady weariness of a man who has failed at two businesses and stopped expecting much. Bong gives him very few showy beats and lets Song fill the silences instead. The performance turns on small physical details: the way Ki-taek smells his own arm after Mr. Park complains about subway commuters, the half-second freeze before he picks up the knife at the garden party. Song carries the entire class argument of the film in his face.

Lee Sun-kyun

Lee Sun-kyun plays the wealthy IT-firm CEO as politely impossible. He is never overtly cruel — he says 'please,' he tips, he never raises his voice at staff — but his charm is a sealed surface that does not register the people working in his house as people. Lee's key choice is olfactory: the small, repeated wince when Ki-taek leans too close in the car, the same wince at the garden party, the line about 'crossing the line' delivered in bed without raising the volume. The performance makes the final stabbing land as a smell, not a moral judgement.

Cho Yeo-jeong

Cho Yeo-jeong's Yeon-kyo is the film's most generous comic creation: a wealthy mother who is gullible, fragile, theatrically loving toward her children, and entirely unable to see the staff she relies on. Cho plays the gullibility as openness rather than stupidity, which is what makes it disarming. Her phone-call exchanges with the imaginary tutors and therapists, her birthday-party planning in real time on a folding chair on the lawn, and her stunned blankness when violence finally breaks into the garden all work because Cho refuses to caricature.

Choi Woo-shik

Choi Woo-shik plays Ki-woo as a boy who has spent his life rehearsing for a life he has not been offered. He carries the scholar's stone like a textbook, speaks to the Park family in the practised cadence of the educated, and lets the film see the cracks only when no one is looking — alone in the bathroom, alone on the hill, alone at the half-window in the closing shot. Choi's voiceover work in the Morse-letter epilogue is the film's emotional pivot: hopeful in syntax, devastating in context, and held inside a face that knows the plan will not work.

Park So-dam

Park So-dam's Ki-jung is the family's sharpest improviser, and the actor plays her with a deadpan competence that makes every con land. 'Jessica, only child, Illinois, Chicago' is delivered in the voice of someone who has rehearsed lies for a living. Park lets Ki-jung be funny without being cute, and finds a private grief in the small moments — smoking on the toilet during the flood, sitting in the bath in the Parks' opulent bathroom. The garden-party stabbing works because Park has made Ki-jung the most alive person in every scene up to that cut.

Lee Jung-eun

Lee Jung-eun shifts registers twice in a single film. For the first hour she is the Parks' efficient, slightly stiff housekeeper, a woman who knows the house and dismisses the new staff with quiet professional reserve. After the doorbell-in-the-rain scene she becomes something else entirely: a wife protecting her hidden husband, a former employee who has been running a parallel household under the floorboards for years, a sudden source of operatic menace. The pivot is one of the great supporting-role turns of the decade because Lee does not signal it; she simply opens the basement door.