The Housemaid gratis im Netz sehen

Im diesem Jahr erschien ein Remake zu The Housemaid, einem koreanischen Film aus dem Jahr 1960. Das Original von The Housemaid gilt als einer der drei besten Filme Koreas. Ich konnte den Film leider auf dem Cineuropa Festival in Santiago de Compostela nicht sehen. Aber glücklicherweise lässt sich das auf der Webseite Mubi nachholen, wo es The Housmaid gratis im Stream zu sehen gibt.

Infos zum Film aus der englischen Wikipedia:

Plot

The film is a domestic horror thriller telling of a family’s destruction by the introduction of a sexually predatory femme fatale into the household. A piano composer has just moved into a two-story house with his wife and two children. When his pregnant wife becomes exhausted from working at a sewing machine to support the family, the composer hires a housemaid to help with the work around the house. The new housemaid behaves strangely, catching rats with her hands, spying on the composer, seducing him and eventually becoming pregnant by him. The composer’s wife convinces the housemaid to induce a miscarriage by falling down a flight of stairs. After this incident, the housemaid’s behavior becomes increasingly more erratic. She kills the composer’s son with poisoned water, threatens to kill their newborn son, and then persuades the composer to commit suicide with her by swallowing rat poison. The film ends with the composer reading the story from a newspaper with his wife. The narrative of the film has apparently been told by the composer, who then all smiles warns the film audience that this is just the sort of thing could happen to anyone.

Critical appraisal

In 2003, Jean-Michel Frodon, editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, wrote that the discovery of The Housemaid by the West, over forty years after the film’s debut, was a “marvelous feeling– marvelous not just because one finds in writer-director Kim Ki-young a truly extraordinary image maker, but in his film such an utterly unpredictable work.”

Comparing the director to Luis Buñuel, Frodon wrote Kim is “capable of probing deep into the human mind, its desires and impulses, while paying sarcastic attention to the details…” He called The Housemaid “shocking”, noting that “…the shocking nature of the film is both disturbing and pleasurable…” Frodon pointed out that The Housemaid was only one early major film in the director’s career, and that Kim Ki-young would continue “running wild through obsessions and rebellion” with his films for decades to come.