362. Hayno (The Housemaid) (1960)

Directed By Kim Ki-young

Synopsis

A family decides to hire a housemaid as they have a new bigger house and the wife has to work. The husband is kind of forced to shag her after she catches him in a compromising situation with a student and threatens to tell his wife. She gets preggers, wife tells her to jump down the stairs to get an abortion, she does it! To get even though she kills the family's son, by giving him rat poison and then telling him which makes him run off and fall down the same stairs! Then threatening to go to the police and tell them the wife made her have an abortion, she convinces the husband to take some rat poison with her. They both die. It all seems to happen within some stupid framing story where the husband is telling his wife this delightful tale with the warning: "It could happen to anyone, don't shag your housemaid". No it couldn't!

Review

So! I've finally managed to watch the film, thanks to Scorcese and his restoration efforts and it was worth waiting for. Thanks for the comments suggesting where I could get it! This is a strange film indeed.

In a way it feels of its time, particularly in its use of a framing story which is actually a bit of a throwback, possibly to allay censorship fears. Mostly the film feels about 30 years ahead of its time, in the late 80s/early 90s we had a spate of "crazy bitch from hell" films like Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Single White Female just to give three examples, and this film is very much in that style.

Both a freaky thriller with a murderous housemaid making a family's life absolute hell it is also an extremely strong indictment of South Korean culture. The attachment to material goods and money-making is so important to all characters here that it leads to the death of four people and an abortion. Basically the whole plot could have ended as soon as the housemaid started acting up by going to the police, but the scandal would have lost them money! Fascinating weird shit, why are all the best Korean films such murder fests?

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In 2003, Jean-Michel Frodon, editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, wrote that the discovery of The Housemaid by the West, over forty years after the film's debut, was a "marvelous feeling– marvelous not just because one finds in writer-director Kim Ki-young a truly extraordinary image maker, but in his film such an utterly unpredictable work."

Comparing the director to Luis Buñuel, Frodon wrote Kim is "capable of probing deep into the human mind, its desires and impulses, while paying sarcastic attention to the details..." He called The Housemaid "shocking", noting that "...the shocking nature of the film is both disturbing and pleasurable..." Frodon pointed out that The Housemaid was only one early major film in the director's career, and that Kim Ki-young would continue "running wild through obsessions and rebellion" with his films for decades to come.

The housemaid sees the husband in the compromising situation: