Mr. Kim is married and has two kids, a boy and a daughter who has to use crotches to walk. Mr. Kim is a piano teacher and sometimes gets love letters from infatuated girl students at a music dormitory, but declines them because he is married. Since his pregnant wife, who is constantly sewing, cannot keep up with the chores at home, Mr. Kim accepts the tip from Cho, one of his students, and hires a housemaid, Myung-sook. However, the maid is infatuated with Mr. Kim and blackmails him to have sex with her, threatening to accuse him of rape otherwise. When the maid becomes pregnant, Mr. Kim admits everything to his wife, who in turn persuades the maid to fall from stairs to have a miscarriage. The maid then lives with them in the house, threatening to go to the police otherwise. When she kills the boy, Mr. Kim persuades the maid to drink poisoned drink with him, so they both die.
"The Housemaid" is "Fatal Attraction" done right, a dark, disturbing psychological horror-drama reminiscent of Polanski's early works, which encompasses several themes, from the consequences of polygamy and obsessiveness, up to the potentially manipulative deviations of the "female victim" notion by the title heroine who abuses it to shamelessly achieves her interests. The director Kim-Ki young creates a slow build up of unsettling mood, starting off with idyllic images of Mr. Kim's life: he is a music teacher, but he finds a love letter when he opens his piano, since one of the girl students is infatuated with him, already foreshadowing the main tangle which will turn such a potentially sweet love story into its disturbing opposite. These threats are conjured up through psychological methods, almost without any violence at all: one sequence stands out the most, the one where the maid brings a glass of water to the two kids, but the little girl tells her little brother not to drink it, since she fears the maid may have poisoned it. The maid then takes a sip, and the brother drinks the whole glass, assured of its safety. As the maid takes the empty glass back, she malevolently spits out the sip she took, causing the little boy to panic from fear. Another interesting touch is the cage with the running wheel for the squirrel, symbolic for Mr. Kim who is trapped inside his own home with the maid. One subplot does not work, though: after what she did to the little boy, it is inconceivable that Mr. Kim and his wife would still keep the maid in her house, since she is a threat to their other two kids. In any version, after the said incident, the maid would have been removed henceforth, regardless of her threats of going to the police. Young still managed to create an effective 'kammerspiel', a minimalistic psychological drama equipped with an interesting (metafilm) plot twist that breaks the 'fourth wall', since he taps on to the humans' two deepest fears: an invasion and disruption of the safety of his/her home; and the phobia that one wrong decision can leave a neverending stream of problems one can never get rid off.
Grade:+++
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