Last Updated on September 28, 2020 by rob
A music teacher (Kim Jin-kyu) with a crippled daughter and a young son succumbs to his materialistic wife’s request for a housemaid (Lee Eun-shim). But the new arrival soon turns the quiet, ordered life of the family upside down and when the teacher sleeps with the housemaid and makes her pregnant her demands push the family to the brink of murder.
A highly entertaining hothouse melodrama which achieves fine heights of delirium thanks to strong performances, atmospheric cinematography and a truly masterly display of mise-en-scene from a writer-director working with little more than a handful of tiny sets. Ki-young’s script effortlessly toys with the viewer’s emotions, at various points evoking both sympathy and disgust with its characters as its supposed paragon of middle class virtue, self-righteous composer Kim Dong-sik (Kim Jin Kyu) allows himself to be seduced by housemaid Myung Sook (a superb Lee Eun-shim, less a character than a force of nature). When Myung drops the inevitable bombshell following their night together (she’s pregnant), Dong-sik’s pushy but also bedridden and stressed out wife Mrs.Kim (Ju Jung nyeo) forces the girl to throw herself down the stairs in order to abort the child. Recovering, Sook plots an eye-for-an-eye revenge that entails taking Mr.Kim to her own bed every night as Mrs.Kim languishes alone downstairs.
As you can probably tell, The Housemaid is at times laugh out loud hilarious in its melodramatic flourishes and yet you find yourself laughing with the movie rather than at it. There’s something about this battle of wills between three strong characters, none of whom is willing to compromise, that is really gripping, almost primal in its impact. It’s not at all hard to see ourselves in these people which is why the film’s controversial final scene is for me a perfectly judged example of a filmmaker extending a much needed kindness to the viewer. Some might not like it but I thought it worked great.
