Bong Joon-ho has named Kim Ki-young's film as decisive, has campaigned for its restoration, and has said it is where he learned what a staircase is for. The inheritance is exact. A middle-class household admits a working-class outsider as domestic help; the house itself, on two levels, becomes the diagram of the class relation; the intrusion turns from service to leverage to violence; and the film refuses to hand anybody the moral high ground, including the people it is on the side of. Parasite's vertical geography, its downpour that runs from the rich house to the poor one, and its refusal of a redemptive ending are all arguments Kim was making in 1960 in a single house.