The Housemaid

Midway through Kim Ki-Young's brutal and nightmarish melodrama, The Housemaid (1960) the protagonist, a bland piano and music teacher, Mr. Kim, meets an older man, a mentor figure, for drinks at a bar.  Mr. Kim elliptically suggests that he is entangled in an affair.  The older felllow pooh-poohs his concerns and says that, under the current state of affairs, a well-connected man can evade serious prosecution and pay a fine for his misdeeds that is less than a "traffic ticket."  At first, this seems reassuring.  But consider the implications:  the characters live in a repressive, authoritarian society in which routine instances of adultery are criminalized and in which rumors of sexual misdeeds have catastrophic implications.  Perhaps, this social environment explains some of the horrific events in the movie.  But, it's also true, that all the main characters in The Housemaid seem to be, more or less, insane -- even the children are sadistic monsters.  In some respects, the movie is a Korean film noir, motivated by a sense of growing dread and entrapment.  But the action in the picture is so authentically horrifying that the film achieves a gruesome majesty -- unlike American and French film noir, this movie is not really entertaining; it's too disturbing to be fun, not a hardboiled crime genre piece, but a domestic bourgeois tragedy so venomous as to literally (and figuratively) defy belief.

The movie begins with a man (Mr. Kim) reading to his wife a newspaper account of an extra-marital affair between a family man and his housemaid; Mrs. Kim expresses horror that such things can occur.  Two children are playing a game involving an intricate cat's cradle that they twist and rotate in different directions.  The film cuts from this web of strings to a textile factory staffed entirely by young women.  After their shifts, which seem to be exhausting, the young women adjourn to a meeting room with a wall-hanging that looks like an abstract stained glass window above a piano.  Mr. Kim appears to the delight of the girls, most of whom seem to desire him.  He leads the girls, who live at the factory in spartan dormitories, in a song.  One of the girls has persuaded her dim-witted friend to put a love letter on the piano's keyboard.  (This girl's name is something like Kwak; her friend, who encourages her to leave the note for Mr. Kim, is called Miss Cho.)  The factory bosses learn of this intrigue and poor Miss Kwak is dismissed.  Mr. Cho, undeterred, pursues Mr. Kim by coming to his house and paying him for piano lessons.  Mr. Kim's wife is an ambitious woman, unhappily married to the rather passive and unambitious, music teacher.  She works night and day at a sewing machine and has saved enough money for the family to move from their tiny quarters into an adjacent house that they have built.  At the outset of the movie, the house is a horrible, gloomy labyrinth of  chaotically-stacked construction materials with a high steep stairway that turns out to be the location of just about all of the calamities that will befall the characters in this movie.  (The walls of the new house are textured with intertwined veins of raised stucco, serpentine reliefs that look like the cat's cradle or like a spider web.)  The house is too big for the hard-working Mrs. Kim to manage.  And, so, she urges her husband to hire a maid.  Miss Cho, who is still lurking around as a piano student, introduces a rather ignorant and slatternly girl to the music teacher -- Miss Cho doesn't want anyone competing with her for Mr. Kim's affections -- and makes a deal with the woman that she will pay her one-fifth of her earnings for the referral to this household.  The maid begins work.  This get off to a grim start when the maid uses rat poison to kill some rodents in the kitchen -- the death of the rats is shown in nasty big close-ups. (Later, a pet squirrel identified with the family's daughter will be similarly killed.)  Mr and Mrs. Kim have two children, a six-year old boy who torments his older sister, a girl who seems crippled, possibly, by polio -- the ten-year old girl uses unwieldy crutches to move around.  (We see the boy taunt her into climbing the steps in the new house, an ordeal that is palpably difficult and seems very dangerous; you expect her to plunge down the steps and be badly injured.)  The kids don't like the maid and she returns that distaste with interest -- she seems to despise the children and implies to them  that if they get out of hand, she will kill them with rat poison.  Mrs. Kim wants another child and becomes pregnant.  When Mrs. Kim and the two bickering children go to visit her mother, Mr. Kim is seduced by the maid -- she steps out of her clothing in a lightning storm, her body lit by flashes of fire, and, in a startling scene, forces the music teacher to have sex with her.  She has torn up her clothing and says that if Mr. Kim doesn't sleep with her, she'll accuse him of a rape.  A few scene later, the maid is puking into the kitchen sink suffering from morning sickness -- she's pregnant with Mr. Kim's child.  Mrs. Kim, who is neurasthenic (either confined to her bed or working herself to death at the sewing machine) confronts the maid.  By this time, Mrs. Kim has had her baby.  The two women literally wrestle over the infant when the maid tries to throw the baby onto the floor or out the window.  After an exchange of blows and insults, the maid pitches herself down the fatal steps, intentionally causing a miscarriage.  The maid, then, takes to her bed where no one brings her any food and she seems about to starve to death.  (She is still bleeding from the miscarriage ten or more days later.)   But the housemaid recovers and forces Mr. Kim to teach her to play piano -- without success it should be noted.  On the soundtrack, we hear either wailing jazz or discordant chords pounded out on the piano.  The maid is blackmailing Mrs. Kim who is afraid that the scandal will cost her the house for which she has slaved so desperately.  And the housewife isn't all that enamored of her husband whom she blames for the nightmarish mess.  To humiliate Mrs. Kim, the maid demands that the music teacher sleep with her openly.  When the children protest the abuse of their mother, the housemaid pretends to poison the little boy.  He panics and flees from the upstairs room where the maid has forced him to drink water supposedly infused with rat poison -- it's a ruse; the water isn't really poisoned.  But it doesn't matter, the little boy plunges down the steps, smashing his head on the floor and dying in his mother's arms.  The maid crows that this is simple justice:  she lost her baby; now, Mrs. Kim's son has died.  Mrs. Kim puts rat poison in rice that she serves to the housemaid and her husband.  The rice tastes of sugar -- the maid has substituted sugar for the strychnine to demonstrate that Mrs. Kim is capable of poisoning both her and her own husband.  This leads to more nightmarish recriminations.  People cram big fistfuls of rice down their throats.  Miss Cho is back, importuning the music teacher for more piano lessons.  Crockery gets broken and Mrs. Kim stabs the housemaid, but the wound is merely superficial.  There's another tempest, complete with thunder and lightning.  The maid and Mr. Kim have made a suicide pact.  They both down glasses of water tainted with rat poison.  The maid goes into a coma and Mr. Kim, as he's dying drags the woman down the flight of steps, her skull knocking loudly against each each tread in the stairway.  Then, he collapses.  He crawls into the work room where Mrs. Kim has fallen asleep at the sewing machine.  She opens her eyes just in time to see her husband writhing on the floor as he dies.  Mrs. Kim laments that none of this would have happened if she hadn't wanted the big new house.  Then, in a surprising cut, the picture reverts to the opening scene in which Mr. Kim is reading from the newspaper account about an affair with a maid.  He turns directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and says that men are unable to resist desire.  Laughing, he tells us:  "This is true for all men, even those of you who are shaking your heads right now."

Everything is pitched at a level of insane hysteria.  The house, although posited to be large, is, in fact, so small that the camera has to go outside in the pelting rain to track the movements of people from room to room.  There are disconcerting close-ups, bizarre cuts, and sequences that have a kabuki-like and surreal tone -- a scene in which Mrs. Kim climbs the lethal stair steps, all clad in white and moving deliberately, like an apparition, feels like something from a Japanese ghost movie, perhaps, something on the order of the supernatural scenes in in Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogaturi.  There are no sympathetic characters -- everyone is vicious, cruel, and conniving.  The children aren't idealized -- they're nasty little sadists and snitches.  The "unnerving" aspect of the movie (the adjective is Martin Scorsese's -- he participated in reconstructing the film) is enhanced by the fact that, at least, one reel of the picture has been badly damaged and had to be reconstructed from faded, half-decomposed celluloid in which lights flare and bleed into the surroundings and faces are dim as if submerged in syrupy fluids.  The tight focus on the steps and the small rooms with their narrow beds and the glass-windows on the porch always streaming with rainwater is claustrophobic -- the movie makes you feel as if you're buried alive.  There are weird byways and digressions that I can't exactly interpret -- for instance, the girl who initially passed Miss Cho's mash-note to the music teacher, commits suicide and the film takes us graveside to a mother venomously denouncing both Mr. Kim and Miss Cho.  The music-room at the factory has a gloomy cramped aspect and is always shot from the same angle and the morose girls gathered there sing a lugubrious song (also always the same), said to be a Bohemian folk song. In fact, most of the rooms are shot from a formulaic repetitive perspective so that the film's mise-en-scene is limited, a "cat's-cradle" of repeated, interlocked images.  The film has an unusual "audio jump scare" -- in one of the last shots, the camera dollies back from the corpse of the maid hanging upside down on the bottom four or five steps of the stairway, pulling into the adjacent room where Mrs. Kim is staring down at the body of her husband -- midway through this gruesome traveling shot, the baby shrieks; the sound of baby's cry made me almost jump out of my skin.