Critics reviews

You might not agree with the director’s attempt to defend the traditional (or rather conservative) values in Korean society, but the sensual imagery and unsettling mood of the film certainly grant itself the legendary status of being one of the best Korean films ever made. It also pioneered the Korean thriller and erotic cinema that influenced the next generation of Korean directors.

Kim ironizes South Korea’s consumerism with blunt, at times outrageous wit, as Bong does. And like Bong’s prize-winner, Kim’s masterpiece evinces moral ambivalence: a fallen husband too eager to purge his guilt, a wife whose self-abnegation makes her—depending on how you see her—a martyr or a despot.

1960's The Housemaid reappeared out of nowhere about a decade ago and revealed its director, Kim Ki-Young, as a forgotten visionary, with a style aptly described as Sirk on acid. To reveal much about this movie's demented, absurdist plot would be a disservice, as it's the kind of thing best experienced cold...

Formally quite radical, the film jumps perspectives, breaks the fourth wall, and just generally disregards conventional rules of storytelling. And it's all the more exciting for this restless, near-baroque approach to narrative, a impulse that wouldn't reach the States for a number of years...

The Housemaid," a 1960 Korean film from Kim Ki-Young, is the film of the set most like a Hollywood production, though if it mostly plays by Western genre rules, the film that results is, if anything, more sophisticated and daring than anything a major Hollywood studio would have allowed at the time.

Kim's is a bleak, Nietzschean view of human motivation, and the whole, with its jazz-score, location shooting, hot-house Sirkian drama and Clouseau-like horror suspense makes for a notably delirious experience.