Opening Day: 11 November 2010

Synopsis:

Eun-yi (Do-yeon Jeon), a middle-aged divorcee, is hired as an upper class family housemaid. But soon enough, master of the house Hoon (Jung-Jae Lee) takes advantage of his social position by slipping into her sheets. Hoon’s visits become frequent and Byung-sik (Yeo-jeong Yoon), an old housemaid, reports the affair to Hae-ra’s mother Mi-hee (Ji-Young Park), who plots to give Hae-ra (Seo Woo) the control over her husband. Soon Eun-yi miraculously becomes pregnant and wants to keep the baby. This is discovered by the family and she’s forced to have an abortion by Mi-hee despite Eun-yi’s plea to let her keep the baby and leave the house. Mi-hee’s plot backfires when Hoon scrutinizes her for terminating his child, even if that child is conceived illegitimately. Her forced abortion turns Eun-yi’s mental condition for the worst and she decides to take the matter into her own hands.

Movie Review:

There is a stark cruelty present in the events of "The Housemaid", an update of the Kim Ki-Young's seminal 1960 Korean thriller of the same name. In Im Sang-soo's manic remake, a young nanny in a wealthy household is impregnated by the powerful and handsome head of the family. It is a gloriously nasty sort of thriller that shows as much of a corporeal yield to lust and sadism as it does to the psychological toll inflicted on all members present in its immoral entanglements. The visual and sonic inertia of the material is handled with the stylish eye of a modern-day Korean thriller; menace pervades each frame and creates a mood piece so vividly created in its moral turpitude and genre trappings of femme fatales and memorable set-pieces. One could almost recall the tropes of Hitchcock's "Rebecca" in its tone, if one squints their eyes and strains their ears enough.

Young divorcee Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon) works in a restaurant and stays in a one-room apartment with a friend. Her big chance to get out and make some real money comes when she is hired by the Hoon household, a fabulously wealthy and fabulously good-looking unit consisting of the enigmatic husband (Lee Jung-Jae), the young, beautiful and very pregnant with twins wife (Seo Woo) and their precociously adorable daughter (Ahn Seo-hyuen). She works under the supervision of the hardened long-serving Mrs Cho (Youn Yuh-jung) who sees the family for what it is: vapid, venal and completely entitled. And entitled is what Hoon truly is -- a man who has everything, had everything handed to him and now wants more. He comes into Eun-yi's room one night with a glass of wine to offer and seduces the willing nanny, who casts come hither eyes at him while serving him his breakfast. The first encounter leads to increasingly explicit trysts and heightened sexual dynamics between them. Jeon Do-yeon is a standout performer in the uniformly well-acted film. Her depth in portraying the hapless Eun-yi makes the character at once heartbreaking and infuriating to watch. She sizzles the screen when she plays the sexpot to the devilishly charming Lee Jung-Jae -- their chemistry becomes something elicit and fascinating to watch.

The director lays the allegory on thick -- the upper-class uses the lower-classes and disposes of them as easy as they receive them, while the lower-class remove themselves from their dignity and morality to get the taste of the privilege they can hardly afford. It is a nightmare chamber of sexually charged energies that address the country's contemporary anxieties through the exaltation and exploitation of the waifish Eun-yi who falls victim to the crass Hoon family.

However, "The Housemaid" does represent a bit of a mixed bag in that it is a supremely well-produced film; darkly stylish and delightfully over-the-top in the vein of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy but it just misses the mark in crafting a cogent narrative when it becomes all about conveying the raw energy of its slightly-bonkers characters and the societal perversions they persist through. Ultimately, the film creates a memorably sticky-sweet experience of deviancy and dysfunction that stays for a fair bit.


Movie Rating:

(A fearless leading performance in a stylishly made mixed bag of glorious thrills and intense sexual dynamics)

Review by Justin Deimen