How Oscar-nominated film Parasite shows that the master-servant relationship is very much alive

Bong Joon-ho’s film, which picked up six Oscar nominations this week, follows a long tradition of films looking at the fraught and often deadly relationship between employers and their staff, says Geoffrey Macnab, but it is far removed from the cosy harmony suggested in ‘Downton Abbey’

The Kim family who work for the wealthy Park family in Bong Joon-ho’s film ‘Parasite’ (CJ ENM)

Smell plays a crucial part in South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s satirical horror comedy Parasite, which this week picked up six Oscar nominations having already won a Golden Globe, the Palme d’Or in Cannes and also having made more than $130m (£100m) at the box office globally.

In the film, the wealthy Park family like to see themselves as enlightened employers. They pay generously, treat the servants as if they are part of the family and even allow them to house-sit when they are away camping – but they can’t hide their dismay at their staff’s cleanliness. To put it bluntly, the problem about the housekeepers and chauffeurs is that they smell. When they come too close, Park Dong-ik and his wife Park Yeon-gyo hold their noses. It may be the damp conditions in which the hired help live in their squalid, cockroach-infested basement flat. It may be that they don’t wash often enough. It may be simply because they’re poor. Whatever the case, the Parks are always careful to open the car windows and air the house once the staff have gone home.

Parasite’s view of master-servant relationships is the antithesis to that found in nostalgic British costume dramas in the Downton Abbey vein. It is set in a modernist house in contemporary South Korea, not a country pile in Edwardian-era England. Bong depicts a world in which money matters more than class. The members of the impoverished Kim family (who pretend they are not related in order to find different jobs in the Park household) don’t look or sound much different to their employers. There is just a whiff of poverty about them.