10 Hidden Details In Opening And Closing Movie Scenes You Completely Missed

Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture-winning masterpiece, Parasite is a film that can work as many things. But it especially works as a daring piece of social commentary about the rich/poor divide.

The film centres on a poor family of four, the Kim family, who all lie, cheat and con their way into getting jobs at an upper class house, owned by the rich Park family. This quest doesn’t exactly work out well for the family - all of them end up either dead, trapped in a basement, or maybe even worse, back where they originally started.

It opens with a shot of a street which then pans down to reveal one of the Kim children, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), who along with his family, is living in a lower-class semi-basement apartment. The ending shot replicates this shot - but this time, Ki-woo has lost everything, including any hope that he can ever escape his poverty.

The never-ending cycle of being poor is something that Joon-ho toys with a lot throughout the film, and the similarity between the opening and closing shot really reinforces this.

Despite Ki-woo setting a mission for himself to gain a lot of money and become rich, the ending shot smacks us with the reality that ultimately he will never be able to escape his situation. He is poor, so he will always be poor. Really heart-breaking, when you think about it.