The Housemaid

Director: Kim Ki-young

1960 / 108min / DCP

Cited by Bong Joon-ho as an inspiration on his Parasite and widely regarded by South Korean cinephiles and scholars as one of the country’s greatest films, The Housemaid can now be discovered by the rest of the world thanks to a restoration by the Korean Film Archive and Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. The routine domestic life of a middle-class family is turned upside-down after a young woman (Lee Eun-shim) joins the household to help with the chores—though what she does instead is turn the house into a boiling cauldron of lust. A mélange of melodrama, morality tale, noir thriller, and horror film that, in Kim’s handling, come together to exercise a vice-like grip.

Part of Kim Ki-young x 2