The Housemaid

When it ended, i was shook. I couldn't believe how insane this movie is. Insane in a good way. I couldn't believe this is a 1960 movie. Even by today standards, this is insane and mindblowing. During the first 20-30 minutes, i thought i knew where it goes and the same will everyone think. But make no mistake, you don't have a clue where it goes. It's not just cheap twists that made this unpredictable but organically flowing turns of the story. I mean, this is coherent and it doesn't shock you just for the shake of shock, with dumb twists that come out of nowhere. The person who wrote this knew exactly what he was doing. Because this is not just insane but brilliant too.

I can't rate it higher because i was not that excited during the first 40-50 minutes. This movie takes its time. I repeat, you think it is just an ordinary story, like a drama romance film noir of this era, with lovers thinking the same old schemes etc. No, it's not. This is way too original and creative. Of course way better than the mediocre 2010 version. The 2010 HANYO is not good. But this is.

Icing on the cake: The last minute. I couldn't believe my own eyes, i watched it three times, that indicates how much i loved it.

Suicides, attempted suicides, blackmail, murder, attempted murder, adultery, paranoia -- the goings-on in this bizarre and fascinating melodrama put even MANJI to shame.

No wonder one critic calls director Kim "Douglas Sirk on acid" -- while Western audiences may laugh at some of the overheated melodrama, this potboiler nonetheless is pretty wild for 1960, and manages to be both lurid and unforgettable. (It's also got one of the great death scenes *ever* -- see for yourself!)

An interesting mix of film noir, melodrama, and morality tale, which also does a good job of keeping the audience off-balance. There may also be some social commentary in here relative to class and making us wonder to what lengths someone will go to preserve their reputation and upward mobility, but I think these were in a minor key, even if the film does bring Parasite to mind. There is something mythical about how this woman manages to invert the whole order of this house, and yet it's also got moments that are intensely dramatic and real, and that was interesting. The threat always seems clear and present to us, because the housemaid (Lee Eun-shim) seems a little off, there are constant trips to the cupboard with rat poison, and the family has a couple of kids. The character actions never quite seem to make sense which worked against it for me, but that's a part of what works the audience up into a frenzy, and keeps it a wild ride.

The acting in the film is unfortunately not one of its highlights, but Lee Eun-shim certainly is striking in the shots of her glaring through the window, and sultry when she's getting intimate with her boss (Kim Jin-kyu). I liked the shot of her bare feet stepping up onto his shoes, followed by the one of his back as her arms circled around him, and in a later scene when her calf sinuously winding around his - they capture the seduction well. Less successful were the cliché, heavy-handed moments, like the lightning hitting a tree after the first infidelity (it made me think of the cliché opening to a novel, It was a dark and stormy night....). The cinematography is pretty nice, though I wish it hadn't been as confined and given a little more freedom.

At its bottom though, this is a conservative film about the importance of family and avoiding the female temptress, which is an age old and tired theme. And even if the man can't manage that, well, his wife should shoulder some blame, and in this case, she does, for having wanted a bigger house (ugh). It was for this reason and for the unevenness in the character motivations that I didn't rate the film higher, but it was certainly entertaining, and definitely had camp appeal.

Quote: "Where are you going?" "Your daddy is going to sleep with me tonight."

I haven't seen before melodrama as stunning, shocking, utterly ridiculous and in full knowledge of it, Korea's cautionary tale answer on marital infidelity to Reefer Madness if it weren't at the same time as cinematically vibrant and obstinate as the best works of Sam Fuller, driven by suspenseful will and heavy with undertones of something at once sinister and horrifying to make you think parts of it were destined at some point for Les Diaboliques or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, as Ki-young Kim's The Housemaid; for all intents and purposes, this is melodrama a-go-go, not in the cosmopolitan sense of the term, but ironic and campy, a dazzling movie steeped in artifice and insanely interesting human behaviour that sets out to provoke and push common sense to a limit.

A well to do couple hires a maid to help out the wife with the chores around the house, but no sooner has she gone into the kitchen to get a glass of water than the entire household threatens to collapse in ruins of rat poison and unwanted pregnancies, illicit thrysts and alliances striken casually and alternatively between the wife and the maid who is now a mistress, the wife and the husband against the maid who they need to be rid off before she talks of the affair, the maid and the husband against each other and their own selves.

The other movie I've seen by Ki-young Kim is, Iodo, a Korean version of The Wicker Man that takes place in a remote island populated exclusively by fisherwomen. It was also utterly bonkers, the most outrageous plotting this side of Italian exploitation, but it lacked the ability to see that in itself, to recognize the madness and defy it. The Housemaid at first seems like the product of Ed Wood incompetence. Some of the dialogue and character behavior had me in stitches. But it soon reveals that to be a facade which the movie can lift and put back in place at whim, so that it can be all things to all people not because of any particular notion of ambiguity shared by Ki-young Kim because the movie is blunt like a hammer in the face, but because it doesn't abide by any notion of common sense or realism unless it wants to. The movie behaves with the same audacity of its maid protagonist. It sets up an image of a socially upwards mobile household where a couple can afford to buy a television even if it means hours of slaving away on a sewing machine to get it, and then affronts it violently, perversely toys with it and corrupts it to the heart.

In the end, if any more clue was required, we get fourth walls broken and a man winking straight at us. This is Panic Theater at its best, with the selfaware avant-garde tropes replaced by unselfconscious soap opera clichés.

... and this one truly did besides being as intense a psychological study as Joseph Losey's "The Servant". I am generally unscareable and though I appreciate the talent in films like "The Exorcist" which can frighten others, for me it always falls flat as I must have been born repeating the advertising line from "Last House on the Left" stating "Remember...it is only a movie, it is only a movie." So the fact that this was both fascinating as a character study and scary enough to make one bejeeberless was impressive.

I actually jumped in my seat at one point in "The Housemaid" and will never look at packages of rat poison the same or even filled glasses of water or some simple rice in a bowl. This psychological masterpiece can cause heart palpitations and I can't even imagine it could be improved in a remake. I kept thinking that the "housemaid" and her unfathomable facial expressions were reminiscent of the maid to Francisco Rabal in Bunuel's "Viridiana" and it was fun to hear the post film comments saying Ki-Young was sometimes compared to Luis.

All in all, I'm so glad I stayed up and watched it in the middle of the night. Sure I could have watched it at a different time, but there's something right about watching a film like that in total darkness and my only complaint regarded the end, but I won't quibble since I also dig films like "The Woman in the Window".