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This is where it all began ! Urban hysteria, claustrophobia , alienation, lack of human connect, individual anxieties , decay of family values owing to the pressures exerted by an ever increasing materialistic society , lack of human connect – Themes which are dealt with in an uncompromisingly devastating manner in the movies of contemporary South Korean Masters, can be traced back to This Masterpiece ! A film which shook the very foundations of South Korean Cinema in its time, a tremor which can still be felt today. Kim Ki Young’s no holds barred approach in his telling of a tale of infidelity in a claustrophobic space which wrecks havoc in the lives of the occupants of that space, is quite harrowing and painful to watch and yet the melodrama never fails to entertain ! A film which serves us a stew of melodrama, horror, suspense and noir and probably gives us one of the best noir heroine/femme fatale ever in film history – Eun Shim Lee in the role of The Housemaid. A Powerhouse Performance, which serves as the fulcrum of a brave and powerful film. The knowledge of the fact that she never acted in any other movie also adds to her enigma and brute intensity in this one. The film is also known for its ambiguously shocking ending which one could never anticipate while watching the film ! A laugh at the face of a society in decline I assume !

A finer definition of claustrophobia there could not be! Much of the closed-in feeling here is due to the care taken creating the sets. They are truly amazing. How on earth did someone work all this out? Note especially the bizarrely corrugated walls, the stuffed crow (it’s too small to be a raven), the masks over the piano, not to mention the bust in the hallway. All of this, and more, populates the world in which most of this film takes place. A few shots of trains speeding by emphasizes the close quarters.

Yet even more care has been given to the lighting. I will need to see the picture a few more times to figure out how it was done and where the light sources are placed. I can’t think of any other film with as much care given these two, frequently unnoticed, elements of film making. The lightning, on the other hand… what we have here is clearly “plot-convenience thunderstorms”!

Lee Eun Shim in the title role is terrific. She glowers and squints and sighs and groans as she goes way, way over the top. Ahn Sung Ki is also amazing as the brat kid. His performance sent chills up my spine as it brought to mind a similar kid on the playground of my elementary school kicking the crutches out from under the poor polio victims. I only discovered after watching the film that he went on to become one of the most popular actors in Korea! You can definitely see his roots here.

One question: Does that stairs trick really work?

And the ending….I LOVED the ending!!!

Plutôt intéressé par le très bon cinéma coréen actuel, je n’avais jamais eu l’occasion de me pencher sur un film coréen de cette époque.

Ce film de 1960 fut donc une totale découverte. Le “sauvetage” du film par la World Cinema Foundation de Scorsese représentait à première vue un gage de qualité encourageant au visionnage. Cette fondation aide à la préservation ainsi qu’à la restauration de quelques perles du cinéma mondial, permettant ainsi que quelques films sortent de l’oubli.

L’histoire se déroule donc en Corée. Une famille ayant deux enfants décide d’emménager dans une maison plus grande. Le père est professeur de musique et la mère s’occupe de son foyer et fait de la couture à domicile. Se rendant compte de l’augmentation de la charge de travail dans leur nouvelle maison, ils décident d’engager une servante.

Le film est plutôt bien fait, il s’agit d’un huis clos dont l’histoire se déroule pour l’essentiel dans la maison du couple.

Sans vouloir révéler la suite, quelques pirouettes scénaristiques nous surprennent malgré l’âge du film.

“La servante” se regarde avec plaisir malgré quelques incohérences. Le ton moralisateur du réalisateur se ressent tout au long du film par rapport aux thèmes comme le matérialisme et l’adultère. A noter la toute dernière scène qui est plutôt sympathique.

Merci à MUBI pour leur concept nous permettant de découvrir ce genre de films.

… It is the first word that me passes for the head after stopping seeing this film, I do not remember a history like that, so provocative, striking, and the fact that he is already 50 years old there gives him a dimension of the only and quasilost piece that thanks to Scorsese we have the possibility of seeing.
Really, it does not surprise me that Scorsese likes this film so much, in fact, in spite of the crudeness and vigor of his narrative form, this South Korean movie possesses such doses of nitroglycerine, that hasat Scorsese I could look like the very kind one.
The history, between tremendista and sordid it is exceptionally filmed, with a narrative pulse increcendo, which happens from the classic drama, to the most contemporary terror, with a loving and sickly triangle where stands out the maiden Eun-Shim Lee, That such fear made feel to the spectators, that it did not turn to be employed at the cinema.
In fact the movie degenerates so much, that in spite of having a final type " The woman in the window " (Fritz Lang), almost that you wait for it, because you think that a history like that in 1960 seems to be inconceivable.
Obligatory, necessary, impossible that happens unnoticed, or that you forget her, and only for his transgression, surprise and his mastery at the moment of being rolled, I him put 10, more with the heart, that with the reason.

Blue Kino’s 2009 release of Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960) illustrates how removing a screenplay’s intentionally ‘ordinary’ conversation patterns from the subtitles can rob audiences of the vitality and pleasure of the original dialogue.

Director Kim Ki-young knew his business as a screenwriter. The film’s opening and closing sequences are often interpreted as bookends of reality enclosing a long dream/fantasy tale. However, Kim’s original Korean dialogue is intentionally vague about ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’. The screenplay offers clues to Kim’s intent. The subtitles should do the same.

The husband and wife begin the film speaking proper grammar in the original Korean script. As the story progresses the husband’s decline and seduction is indicated by looser, stilted phrasing and expressions that echo those used by the uneducated maid. In juxtaposition, the wife’s dialogue grows painfully correct. All of this is conspicuously absent from the Blue Kino translation. Grammar is proper throughout, leaving audiences with a mistaken sense of erudition on the part of the children and the maid. Most telling, the husband’s warmth—at times purposefully hackneyed—is entirely lost. In one scene, the wife mutters, “Having a young woman around the house is like offering a piece of raw meat to a tiger.” The husband then turns to the audience and offers joking advice. Continuing the Blue Kino translation:

—How correctly you put it. Ladies and gentleman, as men get older, they spend more time thinking about young women. That’s how they get drawn into women, which could lead to their destruction. This is true for all men.

South Korean melodramas during the 1950s and 1960s were targeted at a predominately middle-aged, married female audience, as observed by film scholar Kim Soyoung: “The melodramatic genre was considered an outlet for women to release their han (pent-up grief) over their experiences relating to repressive neo-Confucian patriarchy.” The intense emotive quality of The Housemaid was designed specifically to appeal to these viewers, as was the director’s skillful use of juxtaposition. Prior to this period in Korean film, breaking the fourth wall was primarily a comedic device. There are exceptions, but Kim Ki-young’s viewers would have been familiar with this bit of humor as seen in popular films and in Korea’s own folk performance traditions. Kim uses this known comic technique as catharsis to the melodrama preceding it and as bitterly ironic foreshadowing.

The tragedy that played out in the husband’s mind informs his foolishly jocular speech to the audience. He seems doomed to fulfill his own fantasies. When he addresses the camera he steps out of the film and lets the viewers in on his little daydream. Men are men, he smirks. But we know better, don’t we? Compare this dialogue to the wife’s invective earlier in the scene, the maid’s wanton gasp of cigarette smoke and the subtle way the husband notices these facts. In this context the immediate segue into avuncular grinning dialogue takes on dark undertones. The husband’s fantasy was fueled by awareness of this dynamic in the house. Later events may be informed by it. Consider this new translation that includes the wife’s invidious dialogue and the boys’ club humor of the husband:

—WIFE: Having a pretty young thing in the house is no better than serving up raw meat to a beast.

—HUSBAND: Meat? Beast? That’s a fact.
[to the audience] Ladies and gentlemen, as men age they find themselves thinking about younger women.
That makes us easy prey and, well, everyone gets hurt.
[pointing] You’re no different…
[pointing another direction] Oh, shaking your head? Uh-HUH!

The Blue Kino translation is not inaccurate. It is merely tepid. It captures the gist of the original but ignores the affected ‘normal’ speech patterns of the dialogue and fails to match the action on the screen. The last subtitle line (“This is true for all men.”) is almost nonsensical while watching the character’s actions. He is grinning, winking, pointing at audience members. His eyes glitter, his voice is jocular, his demeanor conspiratorial. This combination makes the source Korean film perfectly clear. (“You’re no different… Oh, shaking your head? Uh-HUH.”) The character’s chatty tone should be included as accurately as possible within the time and space available.

The Blue Kino translation is also far too brief. Even at the industry standard of no more than 1 character per 2 frames, rows that fit within 80 percent of the width of the picture, no more than 2 lines per screen and no more than 40 characters per line, the subtitles leave gaping holes between the spoken dialogue and the written word. The scene has plenty of time for the alliterative (meat/beast) and metaphoric (beast/prey) expressions of the husband’s original speech.

The film’s subtitles should do far more than merely transfer words from Korean to English. Kim Ki-young filled his film with dark comedy, pathos, wit and genuine emotion taken to grotesque extremes. Some scenes are overt, others are shaded with a surprising depth and breadth of meaning, revealed through subtle cues in dialogue, acting and cinematography. All of this belongs in the subtitles.

Blue Kino. The Housemaid Reference Book. Translation Supervision: Professor Kim Eun Gi and June Oh with thanks to the Korea Literature Translation Institute. (2009): 38. New translation © 2010 D. Bannon.

Kim, Soyoung. ‘Questions of Woman’s Film: The Maid, Madame Freedom and Women.’ Published in McHugh, Kathleen, et al. South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema. Wayne State University Press (2005): 190.

Lee, Yong-il & Choe Young-chol. The History of Korean Cinema. Jimoondang (1988): 120, 134. Translated by Richard Lynn Greever.

Hilariously over the top domestic thriller melodrama and yet so
wonderfully directed. I couldn’t get over the richness of light, the
perfect camera angles, the way the camera stalked around the scenes,
the profound sense of claustrophobia, the shocking twists (well, first
you’re shocked, then you just laugh… I mean it’s pretty
ridiculous). But just as an exorcise in filmmaking it’s absolutely
perfect. Some of the performances are outstanding as well. Featuring
some really gorgeous actresses turning in pretty emotionally resonant
performances. The lead femme fatale is particularly affecting. This
movie also has what must be the most dangerous staircase in cinema
history! And the last shot of the film is a wonderful piece of dated
Korean moral propagandizing. Really entertaining. I chuckled through
the whole thing.

If we compare this film to other melodramas made in Japan or Korea around this time there is an especially Hitchcockian feel to this film. With the use of many strong motif of anxiety and alienation, looking in from outside, oppressive downpour etc, what you see if the autopsy of the nuclear family. The music is overwhelming at times but not uncharacteristic of this kind of psychological drama.

To read this film in a Freudian way, it is female desire that comes from the introduction of the maid into the patriarchal family structure that shapes the dramatic arc. The young son, eager to become like his upwardly mobil father automatically suspects the maid, acting out against her with insults and bullying. As a symbolization of the father’s libido, the son wants to dominate the maid but eventually is tricked and killed. The crippled daughter like the sickly mother eventually both cannot protect the role female in the traditional home, that of child-bearer and chaste property as the maid detects and defeats all of their attempts to reclaim their role.

This leaves us with the somewhat surprisingly moralist ending where we find out that the dismemberment of the family structure and the (in)correct path to upward mobility has all be a fiction, one that we as the audience now have a safe distance from as the protagonist turns to the camera, points a finger at the audience and says, “as men get older they all have desires for younger women”, meaning you men out there, don’t mess up and sleep with your maid. This last move effectively reinstates the masculine role as decider of one’s own fate and minimizes the role of female desire.

Great film overall though, visually there’s a lot of nuance. Keep and eye out for the maid outside the window when Kyunglee confesses her love for Mr. Kim.

The film definitely has its feverish pitch, atmosphere, and shots but the ending… Along with the exaggerations, its quite akin to a B-movie so don’t go expecting some world masterpiece, and leaps of faith required of the audience at times. And again I note the ending… The ending is quite in bad faith with its sudden preachiness. Still the film was FUN to watch no doubt about that, but like I said don’t go searching for some artful masterpiece here.

What a pity. There’s so much going for The Housemaid: its psychologically intense atmosphere, claustrophobic black-and-white cinematography & interesting premise.

& The Housemaid would’ve been a great film were it not for the excessive melodrama, terrible acting, over-dramatised scenes, lack of realism (how could the husband not see the wife crawling on the floor if she opens the door?), dreadful ending & especially, the pathetic music (this could be the worst film score I’ve ever heard). Had Kim-Ki Young repaired these mistakes, I would accept the view that many consider this as an unknown masterpiece because there is clearly unwithered potential.

I am too contented with my life at the moment. Yet another very good film comes this way. This time, it is a domestic horror story about a housemaid who destroys a household in a very dramatic fashion that involves blackmail, seduction and murder. I think Kim is a genius for playing on this widespread fear on the back of the minds of all housewives in Korea then, who found themselves hiring young and possibly attractive housemaids too. What he produces here is a true horror story, one of a psychological nature, that is gripping, tense and is bound to stay with viewers for the rest of their lives.

To achieve such an effect, Kim constructs a claustrophobic environment where his camera often glides into narrow spaces with no escape, and we constantly see a panning shot of the windows of two rooms when events occur, thus like the characters, we too psychological are trapped within the constricting walls. Also, very notably, Kim employs very dramatic music throughout the film. One can mock the film for being overly dramatic and this and other aspects, but as this is a psycholigical horror, I completely forgive the film and in fact love it for being as such; through this, Kim is truly able to strike terror in our hearts by reaching into our minds and toying with our deepest psychological fears.

Here’s a picture from 1960s Korea where a woman rapes a man, takes over his household, forces herself into having an abortion, threatens his children, and murder is always one rat poison bottle away. In the end of this film, a major character turns to the camera and tries to sum up the picture into a morality play. After what you’ve seen, it feels like a sick joke.

It reminds you of when those innocent little pornographic or ultraviolent pics were made to pretend some educational value. If there’s a genre for this movie, it’s a sort of emotion exploitation. Everything has the worst possible consequences, and the family is made to plough through it until the final tragedy.

The story is pointless to take attention to. It’s a Crazy Bitch Goes Jealous film, the sort that ‘Fatal Attraction’ would make popular in the US years after. Eun-shim Lee is brilliant as the evil housemaid. She achieves an 11 000 in the Crazy Bitches Scale.

For anyone who has doubts over the value of camera movement the first 40 minutes of this film pretty much depends on it, and they are the best 40 minutes. The actors are within the japanese-style melodrama school of acting, to say that they’re overacting is missing the fact that they never intended to express themselves through words in the first place. Unlike in Hollywood pictures, their face, not their words, is their canvas.

There’s very little to no shouting (although they go high pitched, for emphasis sake), but the actors do faces as if they had no words to express themselves. That’s at the very core of enjoying pictures like this is, forgetting there is a screenplay, and simply enjoying what a great director and cast can manage out of otherwise rudimentary material.

There’s a scene where the husband and his mistress are about to go into bed after she’s dominated him, and the camera cuts away to a tree outside the house that gets struck by lightning and gets lit on fire. Sure, you can call that over-the-top, but what’s the point? Would be happier if that shot wasn’t there? I certainly wouldn’t be.

The director takes the movie right up to that point where you’re smiling along with his every choice, and it’s the only the screenplay that faulters him. Forget about what they’re doing, and look at how he shows them doing it. There’s a sequence of two travellings between the housemaid and the wife, that begin in their faces and end in the whole kitchen. The camera movement alone makes what could’ve been a boring, overdone scene into what Martin Scorcese calls ‘poetry’.

This was an intense viewing experience, very claustrophobic and involving but I feel it was belittled slightly by the ending, it felt like a bit of a get-out clause. Maybe this has something to do with the time and the society in which the film is created but I found the end very disappointing. However the ending is only a tiny part of the whole film and apart from that I really enjoyed it. The tension escalates throughout the film and has left me looking forward to watching more of his films. It’s amazing that we can watch it for free through this website and it’s a great way to support and promote the work of the World Cinema Foundation.

The Housemaid was a pretty decent film overall, but was definitely flawed. It was a little too melodramatic for my tastes and about 30 minutes too long. I also hated the epilogue at the end in which the director sugar-coats the film’s message for us! Anyways, despite these flaws and maybe a few more that are left unmentioned, this was an effective thriller from start to finish. I liked the fact that although the film takes place almost entirely in one house, it still allows for an intense and suspenseful flow that hardly lets up. For those that are a little more forgiving, I think they’ll enjoy this film.

An exceptional melodrama, “The Housemaid” is a story about rampaging lust, one free of any inhibition in its telling.

There are no innocents in this film, the least of whom are the music teacher and the young, pretty factory worker who he hires as his family’s housemaid. The teacher’s wife and his bratty children do him few favors from letting out the steam that builds up inside their ideal home. When the situation spins out of control, a sense of shell shock hits all at once, and leaves you feeling like you must see this distressing tale through to its conclusion.

One of the special turns in this movie is the way director Ki-young Kim turns a house’s staircase and a bottle of rat poison into characters unto themselves. To me, it was a memorable feat, and in particular scenes, they really lent a heightened intensity (and absurdity) to the whole movie.

It takes a while to get there, but “The Housemaid” ultimately is a highly enjoyable thriller that definitely leaves its mark. It is far from perfect, though. A whiff of misogyny isn’t hard to detect, and it took quite a while to find out who, besides the music teacher, the rest of the movie’s narrative would be built around. There are also some excusable, albeit abrupt, jumps in narrative that do drive one out of the experience for a little while.

Without apologies, this film apes its style (to spare) from Hitchcock and has a tone that’s very much like one would find in any number of The Master’s films. It’s also fair to say that “The Housemaid” compares favorably with its yearly stablemate “Psycho,” both of which revel in their over-the-top, macabre storytelling.

An alternate title to The Housemaid could be “Hot for Teacher,” as every other woman in the film seems to be lusting after the — by Korean standards — manly piano instructor. The movie is lusty all right. I was somewhat taken aback by the sight of a rain-soaked Lee Eun-shim (a dead ringer for Gong Li), clutching her heaving bosom, as she shuffles toward the ivory-tickling object of her desires with a “fuck the shit out of me!” look in her eyes. And fuck the shit out of her he does, I presume, since she announces her pregnancy in the very next scene.

(Now, for all you Julliard dropouts out there with thoughts of moving to South Korea for endless nights of soju-fueled debauchery, I should warn you that unless your abs resemble a Dentyne “Ice” blister pack and you’re not androgynously pretty the only “tail” you’re likely to get is that which once belonged to a schnauzer, smeared in red pepper paste and grilled over a coal fire. What I’m basically trying to say is that if you look like Billy Joel or Lang Lang your odds of getting laid are nil.)

The Housemaid has two things going for it: Lee Eun-shim’s hysterically funny performance and a tense, claustrophic atmosphere. Other than that, it’s just a mishmash of elements lifted from James M. Cain novels, Clouzot’s Le corbeau, and Ida Lupino films. I’d call it good campy fun except it’s not much fun.

The bizarro ending will have you scratching your head until you cause a bald spot. Makes you wonder if Kim Ki-young saw Psycho prior to shooting this film.

Enjoyed this movie tremendously. The music and moralizing haven’t aged well and add come off a bit over the top and humorous. Everything else is great.. the sets, the tension between the characters, you really can identify with everyone in the film. I imagine the subject matter was very cutting edge for 1960. Excellent restoration job!

The epilogue at the end really spoiled things for me, I would have given it at least 4 stars without it. It seems like it was tacked on, I am interested to hear the reasons the director included it.

This film is definitely an example of technical and formal prowess and artistry. In strictly visual terms, it’s gorgeous, but the extremely classist and patriarchal ideologies that shape its psychological premise were a little too repressive for me as a viewer. I struggled to get through the last 30 minutes of it. The real “straw on the camel’s back” was the bizarre epilogue in which any possibility of an open interpretation was dissolved and that made me feel like I had just been tricked into watching some strange after-school special disguised as a psychosexual thriller.

I acknowledge the historical context of its creation and I think that the fact that it’s been restored and screened for a wider audience is wonderful in terms of preserving an important cultural artifact – but as an individual speaking from the present day, with a western, progressive point of view, it’s sometimes hard to watch something that reeks of such old-fashioned Freudian determinism and class based prejudice.

Kudos to the Korean Film Archive (who have also done great work on many other classic Korean films) and Martin Scorsese for the restoration and for making it so readily (and freely) available. Can’t wait for the DVD (or better yet, the chance to see it on screen). A couple of commenters have raised concerns about the aspect ratio. I have seen this film several times on screen (most recently at the Pusan film fest, where the restoration screened as a work in progress) and I can attest that you are seeing the film in its correct ratio. IMDB is incorrect on this point. It just goes to show that as great a resource as IMDB is, it’s not infallible.

For more info on Kim Ki-young and The Housemaid, here’s my review of the film at Pusan:

http://meniscuszine.com/film/pusan08/housemaid-20090122/index.html

And here’s the site for the Korean Film Archive, where you can read about other Korean films they have preserved, and is also a great resource of Korean film history:

http://www.koreafilm.org/kofa/about.asp

The Housemaid is an intensely cinematic melodrama that recalls some of the great melodramas of Hollywood. For anyone familiar with Kim Ki-Young, he’s one of the few revered masters of classic South Korean cinema along with Shin Sang Ok, Yu Hyun Mok, and Im Kwon Taek. However, Kim’s work is perhaps most difficult to find outside of South Korea so this was a pleasant surprise for me. The only thing that ruined this movie for me was the _____ scene. It’s like one of those psychological explanations employed to ill effect in some of Hitchcock’s films. It did away with all the thunder that was brewing throughout the course of its events. But up until then, very solid representation of what Korean cinema more or less was – flaws and all.

I couldn’t help but think of Fatal Attraction while watching this film. The only difference is this replaced all the flaws in that movie with wonderfulness. It was so ridiculously intense and I love how sympathetic the main character is. Any other cheating horror story, I struggle to pity the main character because he brought it on himself, but due to the situation (he was basically blackmailed into having sex with her) I was able to be moved more. After watching this and Dry Summer (which I actually preferred) I want to give a big thank you to Mr. Scorsese and the WCF!