Parasite tells the story of how Ki-taek’s family, who live day to day on the edge of poverty, slowly infiltrate the wealthy household of Mr. Park through a carefully staged web of lies. Beginning with the son Ki-woo, they succeed one by one in placing each family member into the Park household—as an art therapist, a driver, and a housekeeper. These “con-artist” sequences are edited into elegant montages accompanied by a soundtrack that recalls Baroque music. No matter how many times I watch those scenes, they still feel almost impossibly precise, as if every movement, every note, falls perfectly into place.
There are many characters in Parasite that I still struggle to fully understand. But the one moment I return to again and again is Ki-taek’s final decision near the end of the film.
Why did Ki-taek stab Mr. Park?
When Ki-taek’s daughter, Ki-jung, is stabbed by Geun-sae (the man who had been secretly living for years in the hidden bunker beneath the Park house), she collapses, bleeding heavily. Mr. Park asks Ki-taek to throw the car key so he can rush her to the hospital. But the keys have fallen to the ground beneath Chung-sook, who is physically fighting with Geun-sae. As Mr. Park moves closer to get the key, he recoils. He turns his head, wrinkles his face, and covers his nose at the smell coming from Geun-sae.
In that brief moment, everything changes.
As Mr. Park picks up the key and turns away to leave, Ki-taek suddenly lunges forward and stabs him. Then he runs away. What follows in this film is silence, where the audience can only hear the faint buzzing of flies.
Why, at that moment, did Ki-taek choose to kill Mr. Park? His daughter was dying. Getting her to the hospital should have mattered more than anything. And yet, he killed a man instead, a man who was not even the doer.
My answer is this: Ki-taek had reached the limit of what he could endure about “the smell.”
Earlier in the film, even Mr. Park’s young son mentions that the members of Ki-taek’s family all share the same scent (he didn’t know that they were family). That smell is the smell of poverty, the smell of the semi-basement. The smell of a life that never fully dries, no matter how much you try to wash it away. It clings not just to the body, but to their life.
Mr. Park believes he is reacting only to Geun-sae’s odor. But Ki-taek knows better. That smell is his smell too.
In that moment, when Mr. Park turns away in visible disgust, Ki-taek finally understands that no matter how convincingly he performs this borrowed life, no matter how neatly he dresses, how well he imitates the manners of the wealthy, he can never escape the mark of who he truly is. The times of quiet humiliation, of being tolerated but never fully seen as equal, collapse into a single instant.
And so the knife rises.
Ki-taek’s act is not only an outburst of personal rage. It is an eruption of anger toward a society that makes escape from poverty nearly impossible. It is fury at the lie he tried to live, and at the invisible wall that kept dragging him back to where he began. In the end, he is attacking more than a man. He is struck by the smell of his own life.
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