One Paragraph Movie Review: The Housemaid

Two hundred and nineteenth film: The Housemaid — Hanyeo in South Korea — a domestic thriller from 1960 that teaches us that we should keep our parts in our pants and our rat poison anywhere except the kitchen cupboard. A hot music teacher hires a housemaid while his wife is pregnant, has an affair with her, knocks her up and rejects her, in South Korea’s precursor to Fatal Attraction. Everyone threatens to murder everyone else, one and a half people are killed, there’s a weird vibe where the music teacher seems to hate having sex with the housemaid but still does, and nobody reports anything to the police. After all that and a double suicide, we learn that even though it was the music teacher’s apparently irresistible groin that caused all the trouble, we can probably lay blame on greedy wives and predatory younger women. What an overly-melodramatic, dumb time. One and a half plates of poisoned rice out of five.