Ki-young Kim’s 1960 Korean thriller “The Housemaid,” has been remade by Korean director Sang-soo Im and it looks impressive. The film, set to play In Competition at Cannes next month and for you those you who can’t make it, you can at least get a look at the film’s trailer (via TwitchFilm). Unfortunately, the trailer has no English subtitles, but visually it is astonishing and appears to be a very apt thriller.
Thanks to Asian Media Wiki, we’ve found complete casting info. The film is about a husband and wife played by Jung-jae Lee (“Typhoon”) and Woo Seo (“Paju”) who need help maintaining their new, gigantic house. They hire a housemaid, played by Do-yeon Jeon (Chang-dong Lee’s fantastic “Secret Sunshine”), who tries to seduce the husband. Her obsession with the husband ends up causing a rift between the married couple, and that’s when things start to get messy. Plot details are scarce, and it seems like they probably have updated the film from the 1960s version. In the original, the husband was a composer and his wife started sewing work, having no time for household chores. They had a son and daughter, and the housemaid poisons the son after having her own miscarriage. From the trailer, there don’t seem to be any children and since the film is pushing its genre, there probably will be something more exciting than rat poison to threaten each other with. Also, the original had a young housemaid with an older wife, while the new version will swap the roles, the younger being the wife and the older as the housemaid. Presumably, this was done to modernize it just a tad more, with the young wife maybe being belittled by the older housemaid.
The original is very good, with a pretty bizarre and amusing ending. You can watch it for free on the auteurs, but you have to sign up in order to do so. As for the new film, aside from its Cannes date, it’s unknown if/when it will be released outside of Korea at this point. However, if it meets acclaim on the Croisette, you can bet distributors will be begin to circle. Check out the trailer below: