Remake pours on the sex and the sheen

'The Housemaid' — 3 stars

February 03, 2011|By Michael Phillips | Movie critic

From South Korea, but straight out of Hollywood in spirit, the sleek remake of the sexual thriller "The Housemaid" is best approached as an examination of what happens to wealthy people and their employees who live in a house decorated and furnished with a complete lack of earth tones.

The film takes its cue from the more middle-class and fantastically juicy 1960 original, "Hanyo," from director Kim Ki-young, now streaming for free on Like the original, this updated version unfolds mostly within the confines of the family home, here imagined as an upscale and soulless symbol of arrogant materialism. The house in which this growing family lives is a cold, ashen-toned showcase for objects. In the eyes of the chiseled-abs patriarch, rarely seen without his latest favorite bottle of expensive wine, the new maid is simply the latest acquisition to be enjoyed. The class conflicts here are crudely drawn and, on a pulp level, effectively melodramatic.

Though the film is focused on the housemaid, we know little about the childlike woman played by the extraordinary Jeon Do-youn, who won the best actress prize at Cannes for the heartbreaking "Secret Sunshine." In the opening scene she witnesses a suicide jumper's leap from a balcony onto a city street. This death-haunted prologue sets the tone. At her new job, the maid is spied one night by the husband (Lee Jung-jae, the object of the director's sexual gaze no less so than Jeon) as she cleans the tub, her skirt hiked up. It is only a matter of time before they will sleep together, and the maid will become pregnant, and the longtime senior maid (Youn Yuh-Jung, the South Korean Thelma Ritter) will take matters into her own hands.

Writer-director Im Sang-soo does with "The Housemaid" what many filmmakers do with remakes of influential genre films. He amps up the sex and smoothes down the stylistic edges of the original. The 1960 "Housemaid" is a kinetic, combustible, overpacked wonder, full of dynamic camerawork and a knack for deploying a telltale bottle of rat poison at key junctures. Everybody in the 1960 movie was right on top of each other, all the time. Here, there are acres of living (and dying) space separating the players. Im has pared the characters down to a minimum and focused, with some success, on humanizing the housemaid's cruel plight.

The acting's very strong throughout, though few would argue that the final half-hour satisfies either as suspense, or narrative, or social observation. It feels rushed and clumsy. I really didn't like "The Housemaid" at all when I saw it several months ago at Cannes; in and among more high-minded and risky ventures, it felt like a cheap thrill.

Now, though, in these dog days of early February, cheap thrills are to be taken far less lightly. The film's worth seeing mostly for Jeon, who suggests a calculating minx one second, a vulnerable underclass victim the next. She reminds us how many notes a first-rate actress can play at once, and how few a first-rate actress typically is required to play, whatever the role.

No MPAA rating (violence, nudity, sexuality, language)

Cast: Jeon Do-youn (Eun-yi); Lee Jung-jae (Hoon); Youn Yuh-Jung (Byung-sik); Seo Woo (Hae-ra)

Credits: Written and directed by Im Sang-soo; based on the 1960 film "The Housemaid" ("Hanyo"); produced by Jason Chae, Choi Pyung Ho, Kim Dong Won, Kim Kyung Hyun. An IFC Films release. In Korean with English subtitles. Running time: 1:46.