I’m still in considerable pain from watching Parasite, days later. It’s that great of a film. Even the comedy is disturbing, and then the real anguish sets in.

Pay no attention to backlash against it you might encounter on social media. Any film that makes this big of an impact is sure to get dismissed by latecomers maddened by the consensus of early raves. And Parasite was a perfect candidate for initial left-wing love and subsequent left-wing scorn, because now people go in prepared to read it as a political allegory. They start putting together an analysis of the film on these terms as soon as the lights go down. Frankly, they could do it even sooner, based on the reputation of writer-director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja), plus maybe the trailer.

If Parasite is regarded as a film to be boiled down to a socialist moral, or message, or allegory, it will fail, because it’ll seem too simple and direct. I’ve already been reading the statements of socialist backlash online, and inevitably the complaint is that the film’s message is too obvious and easy to read, and that it gets hammered home in every scene. I’ll quote a pithy one, from my Facebook feed: