The Housemaid (1960)

An unexpected masterpiece

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Thankfully, the South Koreans now make very good movies, perhaps the best in the world in this century, as this does not seem to happen in 1960, at least that's the conclusion you get from seeing this "hanyo". Halfway through, the movie is still going to be reasonable, like the fact that we slowly see that all characters are, in one way or another, "evil". From the middle of the movie everything becomes very bad, the story becomes boring and improbable, the end is the worst I've seen (almost laughable), the performances of the actors are very weak (with the exception of the actress who plays the protagonist's wife). After having seen dozens of Korean films from the last 20 years, it was a disappointment to me this "hanyo", my expectations were high. And the film even promises in the beginning, a pity that afterwards is completely lost and from half to look like an authentic "Mexican novel".

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.

So this maid totally blackmails this man into sleeping with her, kills one of his children, and then incarcerates him and his wife in their own house, right? The moral of the story: apparently, the wife should have never wanted to own her own house, and all men when they grow older are pigs. YUP. Beautiful.Ki-young Kim's modern parable starts in with the social commentary right from the get-go, but after a while devolves into a nonsense horror movie where a completely insane woman holds an entire family hostage with their guilt and fear. None of the family members at any point have the guts to stand up for themselves, so for almost about two hours you get to see a murderer, narcissist, and blackmailer hold sway over weak people with no cajones with poison and threats of the police, while she kills off the family one-by-one.Not to say that the family is completely devoid of their own responsibility, but half the problem is that they won't just chop off her head with a shovel like the snake that she is. There's only so far I buy the "Oh noes, we'll lose our jobs and people won't respect us" after the body count begins. The main problem is that it's incredibly hard to have sympathy for these people. Pretty much nobody acts in any way to improve their situation, and all of them become subject to this woman's desires for happiness that are just impossibly met. It sucks worse because the movie takes place over a relatively long period of time, and you'd think these people'd think it through a bit. But instead it's all moping and shrinking while the maid just goes gradually insane.Not a very enjoyable movie. Shameless moralizing that is not backed up by the motivations OF the characters. Way too little common sense IN the characters. What interest you can get out of the film-making and the cinematography will be forgotten quickly in the painfulness of the plot. Best just to steer clear.--PolarisDiB

Sometimes, it's too easy to give abnormally high ratings to films may not necessarily deserve the honor. The good news is that Hanyo (The Housemaid) is the real thing - the kind of rarity that fills the viewer with such astonishment that you talk about it years later. Kim Ki-young's 1960 masterpiece must be seen at the first possible opportunity -- if you have the luck. This black and white morality tale is pure black comedy, the almost-campy tale of a respectable music teacher whose life is soon complicated with a passion for one of his students. The tone is not unlike a deliciously lurid pre-Code drama about the withering power of vice, but The Housemaid almost takes pleasure at showing the incremental erosion of morality and the corrosiveness of sin. The strange subtitles, some handwritten, only add to the atmosphere. And if you're blown away by the deadpan comedy, prepare yourself for an ending that will leave you slack-jawed for days. The movie's a miracle.Hanyo's construction is inventive and completely unpredictable - a fascinating case-study on Confucian ethics. It's so good that Martin Scorsese and other sponsors funded a complete restoration of the old print, which includes painstakingly subtitle tracks. They did an outstanding job restoring a problematic print that was at the same time extremely rare.You should be able to catch a free streaming video that's fully authorized. (http://www.theauteurs.com/films/2039)Or better yet, the DVD has just been released, and contains additional material about its restoration