Summary
Mrs. Park brings Ki-jung up to meet Da-song and tells her that he has trouble sitting still. In his room, Ki-jung tells her that she must leave them alone, as she never teaches with a parent in the room.
Downstairs, Moon-gwang offers the anxious Mrs. Park some plum extract with honey to calm her down. We see Moon-gwang go downstairs to a pantry area to get the plum extract, and Mrs. Park follows her down, instructing her to bring plum extract to Da-song's room in order to spy on what's going on in the lesson. When they come back upstairs, Ki-jung and Da-song are sitting at the table, and Da-song is attentive and obedient, bowing when Ki-jung dismisses him.
As Mrs. Park sits to look at Da-song's drawing, Ki-jung sends Moon-gwang away decisively. They examine Da-song's drawing and Ki-jung tells Mrs. Park that she studies Art Therapy, before asking if anything happened to Da-song in first grade. Mrs. Park gasps, as Ki-jung tells her that in order to decide whether she will work for them, she must know. She then points out that the lower right corner of a painting is known as the "schizophrenia zone" and points to this area in Da-song's drawing. There is a strange shape in the corner, and also in the lower right corner in the drawing that is hanging on the wall.
Ki-jung encourages Mrs. Park to compose herself and tells her that in order to get a window into Da-song's psyche, she will need to work with Da-song for four sessions a week, two hours each, and at a higher rate—one that reflects her work as an art therapist. Mrs. Park wholeheartedly agrees, as Mr. Park arrives home. Mrs. Park introduces him to "Jessica from Illinois" and asks his driver to bring her home.
In the car, the driver asks Ki-jung if he should bring her all the way home, and she tells him to drop her off at the station. He pushes it a little, clearly wanting to bring her home, and she lies abruptly, telling him that she's meeting her boyfriend. As they near the station, Ki-jung takes off her underwear and leaves it in the car.
At a food hall later, Ki-jung asks her father if he drove many Mercedes Benzes when he was a driver. He tells her he was not a driver, but a valet, and Ki-jung tells Ki-woo that she planted a trap in the car in order to get the driver fired and start the next step in their plan. As they sit down to eat, Ki-woo asks Ki-jung what she did that so affected Mrs. Park the previous night. "I googled 'art therapy,' and ad-libbed the rest," she replies.
The scene shifts and we see Mr. Park in the backseat of his car, finding the panties that Ki-jung left. He brings them home, where his wife is sleeping on the couch. She awakens and he shows her the panties. They are completely repulsed by the thought that, not only did the driver have sex in the car, but that he had sex in the backseat, where Mr. Park sits. "Does dripping his sperm on my seat turn him on?" Mr. Park then points out that the most suspicious element of the whole thing is that the woman left her panties and not something else, which would suggest that she is a drug addict. They try and devise a way to discreetly let him go, as Ki-jung listens nearby.
As Mrs. Park walks Ki-jung out that night, she asks her if anything strange happened when the driver brought her home. Ki-jung says he was very nice, but insisted on taking her home. Mrs. Park is appalled and tells Ki-jung that they are firing him. Ki-jung suggests that they might have better luck with an older driver, and tells her that her uncle had a good driver once, named Mr. Kim. Mrs. Park is eager to meet him.
We see Ki-taek sitting in a test vehicle at a showroom with Ki-woo, figuring out how a Mercedes Benz works.
We then see Ki-taek visiting Mr. Park at his office for an interview. In the car, Mr. Park holds a cup of coffee to test the smoothness of Ki-taek's driving, and the men chat about how Ki-taek has been driving for almost 30 years. Ki-taek flatters Mr. Park's status as the head of his household, and suggests that they will make good companions.
The family discusses Moon-gwang, and the fact that she feels very entitled, having lived in the house even longer than the Parks, as housekeeper for the architect. "She won't give up a good job easily," Ki-woo says to his mother over Hawaiian pizza at Pizza Generation.
As Ki-woo tutors Da-hye, she tells him that she wants to eat peaches, which are her favorite, but that they are forbidden in their household because Moon-gwang has a horrible allergy. We see Ki-jung leaving the house with a peach and shaving its fuzz. We then see Ki-woo flicking the peach fuzz onto Moon-gwang's neck as he leaves the house, triggering an allergic reaction.
Moon-gwang goes to the hospital to treat her symptoms. Ki-taek follows her there and takes a selfie with her in the background, which he later shows to Mrs. Park, asking her if it is the housekeeper. He tells her that Moon-gwang has active tuberculosis, and Mrs. Park is horrified. This scene is interspersed with scenes of Ki-taek practicing this pre-written monologue at home, directed by Ki-woo.
As Ki-taek tells Mrs. Park about Moon-gwang's condition, she is horrified. He texts Ki-jung to tell her that they are three minutes away, and she goes downstairs to spread some peach fuzz on Moon-gwang's neck once again. Moon-gwang breaks out in another rash and starts coughing uncontrollably just as Mrs. Park comes into the house. Ki-taek takes some hot sauce, unseen by Mrs. Park, and sprays it on the tissue Moon-gwang just put in the trash, to make it look like blood.
Mrs. Park has a private meeting with Ki-taek, in which she asks him not to mention any of what has happened to her husband. Ki-taek tells her that he does not have anything against Moon-gwang, and does not want her to know that he heard about her tuberculosis. Mrs. Park assures him that she will be discreet, and make up an excuse for firing her, as she did with the driver.
Mr. Park asks Ki-taek if he knows a good ribs restaurant nearby, citing the fact that Moon-gwang made such good ribs. "My wife wouldn't even tell me why she quit," he says, bemoaning the fact that she was such a good housekeeper, primarily because she never "crossed the line." Ki-taek hands Mr. Park a card for a housekeeping service called "The Care," and asks Mr. Park if he loves his wife. Mr. Park laughs indignantly and tells him that he does. Ki-taek tells Mr. Park that "The Care" offered him a job, but that he turned it down to work for the Parks. Suddenly, he almost gets cut off by a truck, and Mr. Park looks disturbed by his uncharacteristically poor driving. Ki-taek tells Mr. Park he can give the card to his wife and tell her that he found the company himself.
Analysis
A humorous reversal occurs when Ki-jung enters the Park household. She is far more direct and intense than her affable brother, and insists that Mrs. Park sit downstairs while she gives Da-song an art lesson. Mrs. Park, who is already out of touch and scatterbrained, is rendered completely powerless in the face of Ki-jung's forthright attitude, and in spite of her insistence that she always sits in on the first lesson, goes downstairs in a state of panic. Thus we see the ways that the Kims are able to insinuate themselves into the Parks' luxurious lifestyle and even complicate the power dynamics through the sheer performance of confidence.
This sequence, in which Ki-jung exploits Mrs. Park's neurotic fears about her children's well-being, satirizes the extent to which the wealthy family is impressionable to paranoid narcissism. With all the time and resources afforded to her by her class, Mrs. Park is easily taken in by Ki-jung's pretensions of expertise about art and mental health. She gasps and screams as Ki-jung suggests that there may be a traumatic event in Da-song's past, and believes her when she points out the lower right corner—the "schizophrenic zone"—indicates that Da-song is disturbed.
This frenzy that Ki-jung exploits in Mrs. Park becomes comical by virtue of the dramatic irony at play. The viewer knows that Ki-jung is not an art therapist and does not have any special expertise, yet she manages to get Mrs. Park to agree wholeheartedly to the therapy she suggests. In aligning the viewer with Ki-jung, director Bong Joon-ho uses humor to show the ways that members of the upper classes are particularly gullible when it comes to seeking help in their lives. Not only does Mrs. Park agree to a higher rate for Ki-jung, as well as frequent meetings, but she exclaims, "It's my pleasure," completely unaware of the extent to which she is being duped.
In this section we begin to see a little more of the ways in which the Kims are exploiting not only the Parks' gullibility, but also, their classism. When Mr. Park finds the panties in the back of his car, his imagination goes wild with all the implications. What disgusts him most is the thought that the driver would want to have sex in the backseat, where Mr. Park sits. The transgression of the boundaries of class is what Mr. Park finds most unsavory about the implication of the panties, and Mrs. Park gets swept up in his fears, each of them encouraging the other's presumptuous and condescending class discrimination.
Part of the pleasure of the film is watching just how easy it is for the Kims to completely deceive the Parks. They devise elaborate plans to get the resident staff fired, practice monologues as if they were in a play, design business cards that the Parks think are very high-class, and insinuate their entire family into the Parks' staff. The film takes a certain joy in showing the ways that the sealed and exclusive bubble of the super-wealthy is, in fact, quite penetrable and easily manipulated.
