Several critics have compared Ki-young Kim's 1960 film The Housemaid to Bong Joon Ho's Academy Award-winning 2019 film Parasite. Like Parasite, The Housemaid tells a story about an upper middle class family wrestling with issues of class and familial upheaval. The Housemaid follows the Kim family, who hire a housemaid to help them around the house after struggling to find time to do basic household tasks. The maid, who is intelligent and wise beyond her years, starts to interfere in the family's life -- especially with its patriarch, Dong-sik. Eventually, the maid and Dong-sik have an affair, complicating matters in the household and leading to profound tension, and after the maid becomes pregnant and miscarries, an outbreak of violence. The maid starts to plot ways to kill the entire family, including the eldest son, whom she despises. This turns a once peaceful house into a battleground, filled with chaos, violence, and despair.
Outside of academic circles, The Housemaid isn't widely known. Though it was spawned a remake in 2010 of the same name, 1960's The Housemaid earned only $35,000 (equivalent) at the box office and was not widely reviewed. Nevertheless, the film critics and academics who have seen and discussed The Housemaid consider it to be one of the best films to come out of South Korea ever. Calling the film "Claustrophobic and relentless," Michael J. Casey of Boulder Weekly said that The Housemaid is "the perfect intersection of noir and horror, and one of South Korea’s greatest films."
