Song Kang-ho wears an unidentified watch

The film's key art gathers both households in the Parks' manicured garden, the glass-and-concrete house behind them, and blacks out every pair of eyes with a censor bar. Song Kang-ho stands front and to the right as Kim Ki-taek, the unemployed father of the Kim family, in a dark short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, arms straight down at his sides. A watch rides his left wrist: a dark, rounded case turned half onto the side of the wrist, on a dark strap, lit so hard from behind by the bright garden that it reads as a silhouette.

Parasite is Bong Joon-ho's 2019 film, written with Han Jin-won, about the Kims talking their way into the rich Park family one fake credential at a time, until all four of them work in the house and Ki-taek is behind the wheel of Mr. Park's car. A jury at Cannes gave it the Palme d'Or by unanimous vote. The following winter it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, the first film not in English to take Best Picture. Much of the story runs on the markers that sort a person by class without a word: the line a driver is told not to cross, the smell of the semi-basement that Mr. Park cannot stand on the man who drives him.

The watch sits in that same accounting, and it gives nothing away. The case is too dark and too turned to read a dial or a name, and the backlight finishes the job. The poster has already blanked the father's eyes; in the same frame, the one object on his wrist stays just as unreadable. At the garden party, when Mr. Park recoils one last time at that smell, Ki-taek kills him and vanishes into the hidden bunker beneath the house. He surfaces only at night, tapping Morse code to his son through the hall lights.