Character · Parasite
Ki-taek Kim's IQ — what the methodology actually says.
"Ki-taek Kim's IQ" is a popular search. TV Intelligentsia doesn't invent IQ numbers for fictional characters. Here's the honest answer — the show's IQ Score, and what it tells you about how seriously the work treats his mind.
The honest answer
TVI scores shows and films, not characters. Assigning an IQ to a fictional character would be fabrication — we don't have a methodology for that. What we do have: a 0–200 rating of the work's structural intellectual quality, and that score tells you something real about how seriously Parasite treats Ki-taek Kim's mind.
Who Ki-taek Kim is, and what kind of intelligence the show actually depicts
Ki-taek Kim (Song Kang-ho) is the patriarch of the working-class Kim family whose semi-basement Seoul apartment and unfolding scheme to infiltrate the wealthy Park family's home form Bong Joon-ho's Best Picture-winning film. The character's intellectual signature in the show is the working-poor-paternal cognition of someone whose moral architecture survives until the specific catastrophe Bong's screenplay engineers, intelligence-as-collapsed-by-class-violence, the rare cinematic protagonist whose specific class-rage finale the film takes seriously rather than treats as genre payoff.
This is the part of the question "what is Ki-taek Kim's IQ" that the search engine flattens. The real question — the one viewers are circling — is whether the show treats his mind seriously. That's the question TVI can actually answer.
What the IQ Score reveals about the portrayal
Parasite scores 168/200 (Masterclass tier) — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Oscar winner — and Ki-taek Kim is one of the structural reasons. Song Kang-ho's performance committed to letting the Korean working-class-paternal cognitive register be the actual subject rather than as backdrop for the class-thriller premise. The 'plan' line in the rainy basement scene and the birthday-party-finale violence are canonical Bong scenes because Song's character work establishes their actual stakes.
For the full score breakdown — Cognitive Stimulation, Educational Value, Craft & Quality, and the rationale — see Parasite on TV Intelligentsia. Or read what an IQ Score is and how it's calculated.
Read the full methodology
How TV Intelligentsia scores intellectual quality — the rubric, the dimensions, the published framework.
Methodology →