Summary
That night, Ki-taek, Ki-woo, and Ki-jung sleep at a shelter. Ki-woo asks Ki-taek what his plan is, and Ki-taek tells him, "You know what plan never fails? No plan at all. If you make a plan, life never works out that way...Whether you kill someone or betray your country. None of it fucking matters. Got it?"
Ki-woo apologizes to his father for everything that has happened to them, and promises to take care of it. Ki-taek notices that Ki-woo is holding the stone his friend gave him, and tells him to get some rest. Ki-woo insists that the rock keeps following him.
The next morning, the weather is clear, and Mrs. Park calls Ki-jung to see if she is free that day to attend Da-song's birthday, offering to pay her if she comes. Da-hye asks if Ki-woo can come too, and we learn that Mrs. Park has already called Ki-taek over to drive them around to run errands.
Mrs. Park tells Chung-sook to arrange some outdoor tables in the yard, after getting them from the basement. She compares the arrangement she wants to a Japanese warship, in a crane's wing formation. At the store, Mrs. Park calls her friends and tells them to come to the party, but not bring any presents, while Ki-taek bags all of the groceries.
As Ki-taek drives her home, Mrs. Park covers her nose and opens the window, as if to cover up his scent. He sniffs himself self-consciously. Later, while the party is going on, Ki-woo and Da-hye kiss in her room, but Da-hye notes that he seems distracted. He asks her if he fits in with her life, which is so effortlessly natural and cool. As he pulls out the rock, she asks him why he has it.
Outside, Mr. Park and Ki-taek dress up as Native Americans for a game with Da-song. Mr. Park instucts him that Da-song will jump out from hiding and they will "battle." At the end of the battle, Da-song will save "Jessica," and they will eat the cake. Mr. Park tells Ki-Taek that he is getting paid extra, and encourages him to think of his role at the party as part of his work, as a way of warning him not to "cross the line."
Chung-sook gives Ki-jung some food to bring down to Moon-gwang and her husband, but she is apprehended by Mrs. Park, who wants to show her the cake, which she calls his "trauma recovery cake." She tells Ki-jung that she must be the one to bring it out, since she is his art therapist.
Ki-woo goes down to the bunker with the rock, but accidentally drops it down the stairs. As he wanders down to grab it, there is no one there, but he sees a figure lying on the ground. When he examines the figure, Geun-sae comes up behind him and puts a wire around his neck, attaching him to a nearby pipe. Then, Geun-sae tries to beat him over the head with his own rock, but he manages to run away. At the top of the stairs, in the pantry, Geun-sae catches him and hits him definitively over the head with the rock.
Outside, a cellist and a vocalist play classical music. Geun-sae closes the portal to the bunker and wanders out to the party, as a pool of blood collects around Ki-woo's head. As Mrs. Park lights the candles on the cake, Geun-sae grabs a knife and attacks Ki-jung, stabbing her in the chest. As Ki-taek tries to tend to Ki-jung, Mr. Park yells at him for the car keys, so he can take Da-song, who is having a seizure, to the hospital. Ki-taek throws the keys to him, but they land under Geun-sae, who begins fighting with Chung-sook. Chung-sook eventually stabs Geun-sae with a meat skewer.
As Mr. Park grabs the keys, he comments on Geun-sae's smell, which upsets Ki-taek, who stabs him in the chest, before fleeing.
Ki-woo wakes up in the hospital, laughing irrationally after brain surgery. A detective questions him, but he keeps laughing. In voiceover, he tells us that he laughed throughout the court hearings, and even through hearing about how much blood Ki-jung lost. We see Ki-woo and Chung-sook looking at a memorial box for Ki-jung. While Chung-sook weeps, Ki-woo continues to laugh.
At their apartment, Ki-woo watches coverage of the case on his phone, in which a news reporter speculates about Ki-taek's whereabouts. In voiceover, Ki-woo confides to the audience that he has no idea where his father is. We see Ki-woo walking in a snowy forest, spying on the Parks' house. A new family is living there now and Ki-woo watches the flashing of the sensor light, writing the pattern down to see if it is Morse code, a signal from his father. He learns that Ki-taek is living in the bunker, having run into the garage after the murder. Via Morse code, Ki-taek tells him that he buried Moon-gwang in the backyard during the period in which the house was on the market. He also tells him that Germans have brought the house and he goes up to steal food when they are asleep.
Ki-woo writes his father a letter, telling him that one day he will be wealthy enough to buy the house. He dreams of a life in which he can bring his family back together. "All you'll need to do is walk up the stairs," he writes. We see him putting the lucky rock in a river.
Analysis
After the flood, the film gets more subdued and philosophical for a moment. As Ki-taek and his children lay on the floor of the gymnasium, he talks about the fact that it is better not to have a plan, since plans never work out the way one expects. In this moment, we see Ki-taek in a more reflective state, considering the ways that life has imposed such confining limitations on his desires. While the family (and the film more generally) has been more playful and lighthearted before this, in this scene we see the ways that they are discouraged and forced to live in a nihilistic and desperate way, because of their position in the world.
After the Parks return home, the tension between their life of luxury and the Kims' desperate state becomes more pronounced. With Da-song's party coming up that afternoon, the Kims are put to work, while the Parks lounge and give orders. Additionally, the Kims are burdened by their knowledge of Moon-gwang and Geun-sae being in the basement. We see Ki-taek bag Mrs. Park's groceries and drive her home while she gleefully talks on the phone about day-drinking at her child's birthday, a tableau of inequity and the burdens of poverty.
The reason Mrs. Park is so invested in this birthday party is because she sees it as representing a way for Da-song to recover from the trauma of seeing a ghost on his birthday in first grade. She buzzes around, making sure everything is perfect, and even refers to the cake as a "trauma recovery cake." Thus we see that there is a lot riding on the party, and that it is all built around the emotional well-being of the youngest Park child.
The scene at the party is deeply disturbing. Immediately after Geun-sae breaks out of the bunker downstairs, he pummels the young Ki-woo with his special rock, his face twisted and bloodied. Abruptly, Bong Joon-ho shifts the scene outside, where an operatic soprano is singing a pleasant Italian aria, accompanied by cello. Here we see two very contrasting scenes—violent desperation and upperclass aestheticism—placed next to one another. This has a comic effect, in that it is humorous to imagine the brutality of Geun-sae seeping into the unsuspecting and precious world of the party. It is also disturbing and sobering in its political message, representing the ways that class inequality breeds violence and inevitably reaches a point of reckoning.
The film ends with yet another dream of class mobility. Ki-woo writes to his father, whom he knows is squatting in the bunker of the house where the crime took place. He dreams of a life in which he becomes very wealthy and can buy the house himself. For Ki-woo, this dream seems to be less about the trappings of wealth—the status symbols and the house itself—and more about its potential to reconstitute his family, which has been torn apart by their misguided and desperate actions trying to get by in an unequal world. We are taken through a montage, in which Ki-woo purchases the home; in this dream, his reunion with his father is just a matter of Ki-taek coming up the stairs. The film ends on this unresolved note, with their potential reunion suspended in the distance, like a mirage.
