Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: The Housemaid

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss it while cleaning the bathroom in sexy outfits. This is The Instant Movie Club. 

This week we’ll be discussing The Housemaid, a sexy thriller from Korea where a wealthy family’s new maid attracts the attention of the patriarch. 

Next Week: Perfect Host - A fugitive gets more than he bargained for when he tries to invade David Hyde Pierce's dinner party. 

SPOILERS BELOW!

Jeremiah White: The erotic thriller is frequently reduced to tame studio fare packed with cheap scares, or trashy straight-to-video schlock loaded with soft-core titillation, but the subgenre can be a great deal of fun. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of fun to be had in Sang-soo Im’s The Housemaid. It’s a competent, attractive and well-acted film, with more than its fair share of striking images. The plot, focusing on a lowborn woman who is hired as a nanny for a wealthy family and predictably ends up having sex with the patriarch, is more artsy soap opera than twist-happy thriller. That might have worked if only the characters were a bit crazier. In soap operas and thrillers, it usually doesn’t hurt to employ some serious crazy. 

The eponymous caregiver certainly does some crazy stuff, like willingly engage in an affair that can only end badly, but largely she’s the somewhat bland protagonist typically at the center of a thriller. Late in the movie, she starts to become the jilted lover/employee who could serve as the antagonist of a subsequent film, terrorizing a more innocent family, but that doesn’t come to fruition here. The wife and her mother are conniving and villainous, but aside from mom’s bold “let’s push this chick off a ladder” gambit, they’re way too businesslike. You’re really going to let this adulterous servant off with a few slaps and a generous severance/abortion package? How about you turn the screws a little, get psychological with it. The lecherous father is definitely a weirdo, evidenced by his flexing while receiving oral sex. But he disappears down the stretch, and is too much of an entitled douche to ever really let loose with the crazy. 

The family’s veteran housekeeper is probably the film’s best source of crazy. She’s certainly the most interesting character; her attempts to mentor the new hire, her disdain for the family, and her dependence on staying in their good graces create a hurricane of conflicting interests. Yet, despite being integral to the plot, she mostly seems interested in weathering the storm. She threatens to take over the movie, but ultimately feels like a side character incapable of taking us far enough off the rails. 

The Housemaid’s characters are all a bit too restrained for its own good. 

"We're out of Windex."

Jeff Hart:  It must be tough being a lower-class woman in Korea. The concussion-recovery juice pouches aren’t even clearly differentiated from the abortion-causing ones. How confusing! 

Expecting an erotic thriller going into The Housemaid didn’t do the film any favors. It’s erotic, yes, and the frank sex scenes are rendered with the same cold beauty that pervades the film. But thrilling? Not particularly. I’ve developed an unfair expectation of Korean films; a wronged hero will eventually pursue bloody revenge that likely involves bondage or claw hammers. While the end of The Housemaid is as grisly as expected, the rest of the film doesn’t play to my ideas of its genre. 

Better to discuss the film for what it is trying to do, rather than the expectations that I’ve unfairly assigned it. The Housemaid is pretty much a straight forward drama, replete with angry women slapping each other around. It’s also meant as a critique of Korea’s elite – really, the elite anywhere – but doesn’t fully commit to satire. The closing moments, where our rich family are speaking English and popping champagne in the company of their new servants, embody the kind of colorful mockery The Housemaid should’ve strived for. Instead, the film is far too self-serious for its soapy, parody-ready material. 

Like Jeremiah said, The Housemaid’s characters were too restrained. I’d argue, however, that they needed to be zanier rather than crazier. The dopey maid in particular – compared at one point to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot – belongs not in a serious drama but as the fulcrum of a pointed class satire. She belongs in a tragic farce. As the heart of this overwrought drama, her motivations are hard to fathom.  She’s a good-hearted dunce that ends up hanging from a chandelier and setting herself on fire. Wouldn’t that be better if it was played for laughs?