[6] It gradually emerges that on an estate run as a tobacco farm called Inviolata ("Untouched") 54 farmhands live in primitive conditions and work in a sharecropping arrangement.

The farm, isolated since 1977 by a washed-out bridge, continues to be run in a feudal manner by the notorious Marchioness Alfonsina De Luna, "Queen of Cigarettes", to whom the workers are constantly in debt, never paid for their work, kept in ignorance and not allowed to leave.

Lazzaro is a kind and innocent worker on the farm who dutifully follows every command given by the peasants, the Marchioness, her son, Tancredi, and the estate manager.

The police arrive on the isolated estate by helicopter and begin to search for the missing marquis; they are astonished by what they find on the farm, saying sharecropping has long been illegal, the workers should be earning wages, and that the children should have mandatory education.

Lazzaro, distracted by a police helicopter, falls off a cliff and is left behind; later a wolf (perhaps real, perhaps symbolic) spots him and identifies him by smell as a good man.

She takes him into a circle of impoverished survivors of Inviolata, who now survive by crime having lost their home and having received no compensation or state assistance.

They express disbelief and uneasiness as to his lack of aging and tell him of the Great Swindle, but Lazzaro is more concerned with finding Tancredi.

Though unsure, they arrive with expensive pastries they could ill-afford as gifts, only to discover that Tancredi is bankrupt and lives in a slum, and has supposedly forgotten about their meeting.

The site's critics consensus reads, "Happy as Lazzaro uses a friendship's ups and downs as a satisfyingly expansive canvas for a picture rich with thematic and cinematic depth.

"[7] Bong Joon-ho said the film "probes the rift between agrarian and modern life, and contains one of the most dazzling twists – and tracking shots – in recent memory.