Review of The Housemaid / 하녀, directed by Kim Ki-young

When I was seventeen, I won a life changing scholarship that fully funded me to go study abroad in South Korea in order to learn Korean. When I returned to the United States from Korea, I immediately moved to New York City to college, where I signed up for a Korean film course because I thought that it would help the sadness I felt from moving back.

Anyways, this contemporary Korean film course ended up sparking my love for film in ways that I never could experience before, as my family doesn’t watch movies and it was often a love I hid within myself. Now, years later, I have this blog and work as a film critic.

That said, one of the movies we watched when I took this class was The Housemaid. We basically had this movie to watch as a precursor to a lot of more modern Korean films (modern in the sense that it was closer to 2018), as quite a few directors were inspired by Kim Ki-young and works like The Housemaid.

Since I’ve been writing a lot about it in my life outside of this blog, I thought to rewatch the movie and what made it magical. Here’s my review!

When a new maid is brought into the home, it tears apart one marriage and family.

This movie focuses on the Kim family, who’ve become newly middle class in a post-war Korea, as Mr. Kim works at a factory, and are enjoying the fruits of their labor.

A pianist has a newspaper in his hands, and he’s narrating the story on it to his wife: a man has fallen in love with the maid he brought into the family home.

At the factory, one of the female workers writes him a letter, after being pressured by one of her friends, confessing that she loves him.

She’s fired because of it, but her friend, Miss Cho, continues working there and takes piano lessons with Mr. Kim. Mr. Kim’s wife has a job as a dressmaker, and doesn’t want to do the house chores, so what they decide is they’re going to hire a maid. Mr. Kim asks Miss Cho, who recommends Myung-sook, who works at the factory as a cleaner.

As it turns out, her other friend killed herself after unable being able to find another job. Myung-sook is brought into the Kim’s house, but she’s an odd one. She starts grabbing rats with her bare hands, and makes strange remarks to the children. She also peers through the cracks in the doors as Mr. Kim is in bed with his wife.

Miss Cho ends up confessing to Mr. Kim that she made her friend, who killed herself, write the letter. It was Miss Cho who actually was in love with him. He then tells her no, and Myung-sook, working at the factory, watches as the whole thing goes down.

But, as it turns out, she sees this as an opportunity. She comes up to Mr. Kim and seduces him, marking the beginning of a painful affair between the two. However, Myung-sook becomes obviously pregnant, and it’s assumed that it was with Mr. Kim. He confesses to his wife, and she makes a plan to force Myung-sook to throw herself down the stairs.

Myung-sook complies, and has a miscarriage. However, this is the snapping point for the young woman. She makes threats to kill the newborn child in the home, and then Mr. Kim has to fight her as she makes good on that threat. She sees the rat poison in the house, and has a new idea.

When the other son is around, she gets some water for him. As he drinks it, she tells him smoothly that she poured rat poison into it. She didn’t actually, but he panics and then runs away, falling down the stairs and accidentally killing himself. It’s an eye for an eye now.

They don’t call the police. The wife, Mrs. Kim, decides to tell Myung-sook that she’ll be supported and won’t lose her job, that she can have what she wants. Myung-sook makes it clear that she wants Mrs. Kim’s husband though, and he’s moved into her bedroom.

Mrs. Kim works tirelessly at her sewing machine to provide for the family, but because Myung-sook now runs this house, Mrs. Kim and their daughter decide to try and poison her. Myung-sook survives, though, and then convinces Mr. Kim to make a suicide pact under the terms she won’t hurt anyone.

He takes the poison, crawls down to his wife while dying, and tells her to take care of the kids.

We go back to the pianist, who is reading the story to his wife. He ends it with saying, “This could happen to anyone.”

Overall Thoughts

I can see why this movie is so beloved—there’s a lot to admire in the craft and writing, that’s for sure.

Although, it does reflect the attitudes of the period at the time very heavily. We see some progression for women’s independence in the film through the fact the wife, Mrs. Kim, works for a living, allowing the family some nice things.

However, this comes with a caveat: chasing after nicer, Western ideals might lead the family to ruin. My master’s thesis dwells on the fact that women in Korean literature and arts are often depicted as a medium in which han/sorrow manifests, and I thought that this was something that definitely appears in this film.

A woman comes into the home and is the source of tragedy, essentially become a home wrecker and a life ruiner. Yet Mr. Kim, the patriarch, is complicit in all of this. The ending of “This could happen to anyone” creates a throughline that anyone could come into this position of temptation, making it a perpetual cycle.

Anyways, this is a fascinating movie. Give it a chance if you haven’t already.

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