Written and directed by Kim Ki-young
There’s a general, and justified, perception of movies predating the 70s to be languid, coordinated productions, like a stately town car gliding along to give you a good look at it. Its long takes give you time to take in its performances, mild-mannered and relatable, along with its sets, like it’s a piece of moving theatre. The Housemaid is the antithesis to all that, despite coming up on retirement age.
It’s a frenetic, uncouth thing, raunchy and inexplicable, possessed by a wicked energy that wants to shock and entertain you against your better judgment. With diabolical subject matter and a frenetic mode of storytelling, it’s something truly against the grain, a brick thrown into the washing machine, a jug of water poured into your old-timey television set.
Dong-sik Kim (Kim Jin-kyu) teaches music to factory workers as some kind of after-work program, and since he’s apparently the only man around, he attracts a lot of attention from his female students. After one student kills herself in shame after her advances are rebuffed, Kim fails to learn his lesson and hires one worker as the live-in housemaid in the home he shares with his wife and two-soon-three children.
Again, Kim is irresistible for reasons known only to the women in The Housemaid, but where other women will desperately plead for his attention, the housemaid Myung-sook, played with crazed obsession by Eun-shim Lee, takes matters into her own hands, and in a game of psychological extortion, she turns the little happy home into a nightmare for just about everybody, herself included.
Nothing is right in The Housemaid: the DIY project that is the Kim’s home features stonewall hallways that seem at home in a medieval castle, stuffy parlors, and rooms that are like solariums with their wooden floor-to-ceiling windows. This is emblematic of the film as a whole, as a project whose reeling ways keep surprising you. It has the feel of stepping into someone’s home and thinking I can’t believe you live like this, being both impressed and suspicious.
So Kim’s movie is like an act of voyeurism where you watch another family from across the street as they descend into madness with the house burning down around them. The histrionic acting underlines the pressure cooker of an atmosphere director Kim seeks to evoke, and it does get away from him at times,with the movie veering into the amusingly absurd rather than the unsettling surreal.
Its characters don’t behave like you’d expect, or even want, and the editing is an act of terrorism at times. This is not a refined, even cohesive, story about one woman’s rampage through the life of a middle-class family, but anyone keen on a messy, sparking live wire uncurling itself with a vengeance when you least expect it should slap eyes on The Housemaid.
Mikkel Frederiksen 