The Handmaid - a landmark in what has become one of the greatest cinema cultures in the world

Kim Ki-young's 1960 b/w film, The Housemaid (considered one of the greatest of all Korean films, and remade in 2010) is without a doubt one of the strangest films I've ever seen. It will clearly remind some viewers of Fatal Attraction, but it's more weird and spooky. The story line is pretty straightforward if extremely odd: a husband and wife (with two young children), sitting in domestic bliss, discuss the possibility of hiring a housemaid to help w/ their daily family life. We cut, then, to a scene at a factory (all women employees working textile looms; after work they all attend classes and they all live in dorms - much like American mills in the 19th century), where one of the women speaks openly about her crush on the music teacher (the husband we saw in the first shots); when this crush becomes known, the woman is fired and sent home where, we soon learn, she kills herself out for shame and sorrow. Another one of the women in the mill signs on to take piano lessons with the music teacher, and she soon brings along another woman (never clear to me whether she also works in the mill; in any event, it's clear she was never a good or serious student) to work as the housemaid. And the troubles begin: in one horrifying scene the wife in the family, looking through some kitchen  cabinets, is startled by a rat; this leads to their purchase of rat poison, which, incredibly, they keep among the kitchen condiments. So we're just waiting for the poison to play a role, which it will. The mother and kids go away for a weekend, and the handmaid comes on to the husband and he can't resist; soon, both the wife and the handmaid are pregnant, Wife tells Handmaid she can continue to work for them, but has to end her pregnancy; she hurls herself down the rickety, steep stairs in the house, leading to a miscarriage - and much more family turbulence. Ultimately, the wife tells her husband to go upstairs and sleep w/ the handmaid - but many more scenes of violence - the poison, stabbings, physical fights, threats to the newborn, horrible scenes all - take place in the small house. The house itself is a horror - the walls some kind of weird concrete w/ strange veins and bulges throughout and with scary masks hanging on the walls. Everything is too crowded and dangerous, w/ a constant threat as the children - one of who has to used hand crutches - try to manage the staircase. Plus there's a soundtrack of highly discordant music, sometimes just an awful pounding on the piano keys, particularly by the Housemaid who has no musical knowledge or skill but just needs to make a racket. There's even a strange twist at the end of the movie, which in a sense brings back to the starting point. No one would find this a pleasant movie to watch, but I'd say once you're in it's impossible to stop watching, completely gripping, unique, and surprising - clearly a starting point in what has since become one of the greatest cinema cultures in the world.