The Housemaid
But this one is absolutely brilliant. I normally dislike horror movies, but I have always found the Asian ones very scary from a psychological standpoint. The titles that made it big, like Ring, scared the shit out of me and so did this film. The dramatic music, the cinematography and the play with lights – all of it is extremely well done and greatly contributed to the suspenseful and excruciatingly dense mood of the film. Whoever thinks that Korean cinema has only become good after 2000 should be proven wrong with this film.
From a personal viewpoint however, this is simply not my type of film. I think that it is great to give film students to dissect its effects and how the character play together, but ultimately I wasn’t all that impressed by the story. I love femme fatales but am not a huge fan of this particular one, because all it says seems to be „Be careful of evil housemaids who destroy your family“. The truth is that everybody is actually to blame, and to some degree, everyone including the man and the children are somewhat. It’s just that they are on „the right side of society“, whereas I’m not really a fan of films that show so blatantly what a danger crazy women are to society.
What I really, really liked was the ending. I love how it shows the same characters in a somewhat different way; it was very original, a little surprising and wonderfully acted out. I also liked how it was such a clin d’oeil after the scary scene from before.
So yeah, if you are into somewhat more sophisticated horror movies, you can watch it on The Auteurs (one of the few things you can actually watch on that website, and the first thing I have seen) and be sure to have a dark room and somebody with you. ;)