Movies Reviews

The Housemaid – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Jan 27, 2011, 14:42 GMT

A man\'s affair with his family\'s housemaid leads to a dark consequences. ...more

Too many cell phones and I-pods makes for bad Feng Shui in this updated potboiler about a housemaid’s job gone terribly wrong.

Director Im Sang-Soo (“The President’s Last Bang”) takes the tiger by the tail in attempting a reinterpretation of the Kim Ki-young classic “The Housemaid.” Eun-yi (played by Jeon Do-youn--Cannes Best Actress winner in “Secret Sunshine”) is hired as a nanny and housekeeper to replace the aging housekeeper Byung-sik (played by Yun Yeo-jong).

The audience is let in on Byung-sik’s opinion from the very beginning. She hates her new, young and very sexy replacement. What we do not know, yet, is that she despises the family for which they both work, even more.

The story begins on the teeming streets of Seoul with the carnage and chaos of an unexplained suicide. Amidst the traffic and countless standing, faceless bodies, one drops to the ground with a sickening thud. All that is left is the outline of what was once a human being.

Young, naïve Eun-yi arrives at her new place of employment, which turns out to be the Hearst Castle relocated to Seoul. OK, maybe it is just the summer cottage of the founder of Hyundai. In any event, it is huge and lavish, the Taj Mahal of Southeast Asia. Eun-yi is as lost in it as a doll would be lost in a dollhouse the size of a Wal-mart.

Although the lady of the house, the impossibly, hugely pregnant Hae-ra (Seo Woo) and her mother (Park Ji-young) remain cool to their new servant, the master of the house Hoon (Lee Jung-jae) gives her a warm reception.

A couple months later she’s a girl in trouble and everybody is scrambling for their weapons in a war of nerves and outright violence.

The story is fantastic - a vivid exploration of conflict based on sex, class and age. The initial seduction of the stunningly alluring Jeon Do-youn by the very handsome Lee Jung-jae is a masterwork of soft-core porn.

Not only is their every move choreographed with perfect precision but there is an injection of humor into the nastiness that equals anything done by Woody Allen or Peter Sellers. Lee must balance the wine bottle while he is fondling the housemaid and sometimes the two seem to be fighting each other for his attention.

It is similar to a James Bond sequence where the master spy cannot decide whether to shoot the gun or grab the girl. You see, they are both so desirable.

As the film progresses, the audience is tipped off to the trouble coming as the senior housekeeper Byung-sik begins to break down. She is breaking down under the stress of turning over another innocent to the evil family but she is breaking down as a symbol of society’s breakdown as well.

We are moved out of the house and into the streets of the cities of world, waiting to see a replay of the nameless innocent jumping from the roof and becoming an outline on the street.

This breakdown is accompanied with simple, good old fashioned, Western drunkenness on the part of the old woman. Too much disorder, no respect for the old ways.

“Housemaid” starts off great but slows down seriously in the last half. The urban setting is a perfectly chosen backdrop for a wired and connected Asian society that is panicked and numbed at the same time.

Coupled with claustrophobic inner city crowding, the result is a graphic display of human alienation through machination, artificial, stilted and disjointed communication and the fight for individual survival.

The erotic scenes are lush and all of the personal interactions have a deliciously understated and snarky humor about them; consistent with the dishonesty and self-delusion creeping in to saturate human lives as a result of the characters’ disconnected relationships.

Yun Yeo-jong, playing the retiring maid, should be nominated for an Oscar. She transforms from robot to human being before our very eyes, with disastrous consequences. Too bad the other performances are not as dynamic.

By the time of the horrific ending, many will be grateful just for the film to end. The intent is to build to a climax using Hitchcock’s slow release of information, but the last 30 minutes were just too slow.

The filmmakers became over-confident with the powerful characters they had made in the beginning and sought to drag it out too long. Admittedly, this is a typical American reaction to many Asian films, but the ball was dropped a bit in this one.

Visit the movie database for more information.

Directed by: Sang-soo Im
Written by: Sang-soo Im (screenplay) and Ki-young Kim (characters)
Starring: Do-yeon Jeon, Jung-Jae Lee and Seo-Hyeon Ahn 
Release Date: January 21, 2011
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 106 minutes
Country: South Korea
Language: Korean with English sub-titles
Color: Color