just watch it!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Not to be confused with the Vietnamese 2016 film of the same name, this South Korean film was included in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, the title made it obvious what it was about, but I didn't know about the concept or plot, I just watched and found out for myself. Basically set in the 1960s, music teacher and composer Dong-sik Kim (Jin Kyu Kim) reads a story to his wife Mrs. Kim (Jeung-nyeo Ju) about a man falling in love with his maid. The story then jumps to the composer working in a factory; he, his wife and their children have just moved into a two-story house. His wife is pregnant and becomes exhausted from working at a sewing machine to support the family. So, the composer hires a housemaid named Myung-sook (Eun-shim Lee) to help with the work around the house. The new housemaid behaves strangely, catching rats with her hands, spying on the composer and trying to seduce him, eventually she lures him and becomes pregnant with his child. The composer's wife discovers his infidelity and convinces the housemaid to induce a miscarriage by falling down a flight of stairs. After this incident, the housemaid's behaviour becomes more erratic, including threatening the life of the composer's newborn son. The housemaid tricks the composer's son Chang-soon (Sung-Ki Ahn) into believing that he has ingested poisoned water, and in a panic, he falls to his death down a flight of stairs. Myung-sook persuades the composer to commit suicide with her by swallowing rat poison. The film ends at the point it started, with the composer reading the newspaper to his wife, so the narrative has apparently been told by the composer, he smiles and warns the film audience that this sort of thing that could happen to anyone. Also starring Aeng-ran Eom as Kyung-hee Cho and Yoo-ri Lee as Ae-soon Kim. This black-and-white film has been described as a "domestic horror", it is a very simple story of a woman hired to do the house chores, ends up having an affair with the man of the house, and becomes a deadly femme fetale, but it has suspense and disturbing bits that keep you guessing where it will go, an interesting thriller. Good!

Ki-young Kim's "The Housemaid" proved an interesting viewing experience for me, in that it ultimately differed very much from what I had come to expect about a half hour into the film. What we appear to have here is another film like Joseph Losey's "The Servant", which was a left-wing, revolutionary exercise in which a lower class man enters an upper class household as a servant, and ultimately takes over the bourgeois home, throwing it into upheaval and chaos. Likewise, in "The Housemaid", a young woman joins a wealthier household as a maid, and instantly things begin to take a turn toward disorder and familial disintegration. It could easily be a revolutionary, communist film like Losey's. It is not.In fact, it is the polar opposite. It turns out that "The Housemaid" is actually an overtly conservative film. This film is undebatably a defense of traditional family values like faithfulness, fidelity, and monogamy. Another film with a virtually identical plot could have just as easily been an attack on those same values. In "The Housemaid", however, the character of the maid is not the instrument of revolution, the hand of Marxist justice that has come to wipe out every trace of bourgeois society from our microcosmic household (e.g. Dirk Bogarde's character in "The Servant"); rather, she is the face of temptation, the tantalizer that will be the destruction of a healthy, happy family, should the patriarchal figure fall into that inescapable abyss of adultery.Some viewers have interpreted the film in other ways, though I don't see how they could. This isn't that kind of film. There really isn't anything ambiguous here. The only exception — the one place where interpretation of the film's message might become a bit convoluted — is the framing device that Kim uses at the film's bookends. I would note the likelihood that this was added for the sake of the censors. After all, it is somewhat surprising that Kim got this film passed in the first place, and the frame story, which abruptly obliterates the reality of the film's central storyline, may have been the only reason he was able to do so. Despite my usual partiality for any kind of narrative complexity or nonlinear structure, I felt this device was mildly detrimental to the film's integrity. Regardless, it really doesn't change anything about the nature of the film's message. Thematically, the key moment in the film comes fairly early on, immediately after the decisive act of infidelity. Kim goes to great lengths to underline this instant as the pivotal moment in the lives of his characters, a moment from which there will be no return. He achieves this rather heavy-handedly, by cutting away from the room in which the action occurs, to a shot of a large tree standing outside the house, which is immediately struck by lightning, as if to make it abundantly clear, written in Fuller-esque boldface type: This is the moment that changes everything! This is the undoing of a family!It's not a subtle film, needless to say. There are, however, master touches throughout. The cinematography is certainly impressive, as is Kim's direction. The laterally panning shots through the plate glass on the upper floor of the house are fantastic. It is quite a well shot film, and Kim works inspiringly within the limited space of only a few settings. Dramatically, however, "The Housemaid" was somewhat disappointing. The film can't decide whether it wants to be a Buñuelian art film or a Hitchcockian thriller, and the resulting blend is very uneven, increasingly as the film progresses. Kim never gives this film any real, constant identity. The score was quite poor. With its obtrusive and highly transparent attempts at creating tension and coercing the viewer into a certain emotion, it never ceased to intrude on the viewing experience.This may be a political film — it certainly has a plainly conservative message — but if it is, it's not because Kim intended it to be. Despite being pressured by his government to foray into political filmmaking on a few occasions, Kim himself was not particularly interested in politics. He once said, "North or south, capitalist or communist, ideology is far less interesting to me than the things that divide the sexes."Indeed, this is evident in "The Housemaid". Kim is clearly much more interested in the boundaries and barriers between men and women — the impediments that obstruct the path to intimacy and healthy relationships — than he is in any specific political ideology. And this is where the film regains some of its composure. Comparisons have been made to the work of Luis Buñuel and Shôhei Imamura. I can see it, in terms of its portrayal of passion and conflicted attempts at intimacy between the sexes, but on the whole I think those are pretty loose comparisons. "The Housemaid" works best as a psychological drama. When we analyze the motives of the characters, and what drives each of them toward their respective actions, the film comes into focus fairly nicely. When it tries to move into suspense, however, it looses its momentum as a drama, and as a successful, cohesive work of cinema.All things considered, I think this is a good film. I can't call it a masterpiece, or even a great film, although I know many feel that way about it, but I do think it's quality cinema that's worth seeing. My biggest complaint with the film is its extreme lack of subtlety, in multiple facets of the art of filmmaking. Dramatically, "The Housemaid" goes way over the top one too many times, and thematically, the film essentially boils down to a cautionary tale about adultery and infidelity. Nonetheless, it's a film that deserves to be seen, especially with the relatively small place that South Korea occupies in the cinematic landscape.RATING: 7.33 out of 10

A very intense psychological thriller, which could have received a higher rating from me, if not some of its drawbacks that somewhat belittle the overall impression. And the main of them is complete, at times even laughable silliness of the family members. E.g., why didn't the papa or the mama throw away that f***ing bottle of rat-poison, even after the death of their son? Were they so sure that their housemaid wouldn't use it again? What can I say, the father's actions in the second half were awfully and unbelievably idiotic, even if that gutlessness was undoubtedly intended by the director.Having said that, I must repeat that it's a very good film that has some excellent cinematography plus even the children characters are quite amusing and natural, especially their sonny.

A hardworking but successful happy family encounter big drama when their house gets so big they need a housemaid to be on the top of things. Hanyo starts off typical for it's time (in Korea) with a clear distinction of class and desires for climbing socially. I was a little worried if it could be worth the acclaim in the beginning, but it creeps in on you soon enough with hitchcockian tension, slapstick humour and lyrical sequences reminiscent of Yasujiro Ozu.The housemaid herself is amazing, she lures you, twists you around her little finger and disgusts you at the same time. The special east-Asian resignation towards tragic fate makes it double tragic and by the end you'll be gasping for breath.I also warmly recommend the 2010 version of hanyo which is not as much a remake as a inventive homage, they go very well together.