The Housemaid Movie 2016

[Janne Evers]

Thisbook was definitely a one that I read after being heavily influenced by fellow bookstagrammers. I have seen rave reviews for it, including the audiobook. I decided to give it a try on my long holiday drive. I am proud to say that this is actually the first fiction audiobook I have listened to in its entirety.

The Housemaid is a domestic psychological thriller about a live-in housemaid with a secret past who discovers that her new employers have secrets of their own. It heavily relies on several tropes, but the ends redeems the story a bit.

I found that The Housemaid took more than half of the book for anything much to happen. There are small events in the first half but nothing very exciting. I thought it was a long slog to the first real twist. When the story does pick up, it goes off the rails and throws all kinds of craziness at you. The last quarter of this book along with the ending is by far the best part. It is the only portion that had me invested and rushing to find out what happens. I will say that this is one thriller that requires a complete suspension of belief to enjoy its unhinged storyline.

The Housemaid was ultimately a fun read but not groundbreaking. Perhaps I have read too many thrillers, but this plot was unoriginal. I have read several books like it, and I knew the plot twist very early on.

Overall, The Housemaid is a popcorn thriller that is a quick, easy read. Despite the fact I did not find it the most original, I can not deny that this was a fun and enjoyable read. The sequel will be published in February 2023, and I will be picking it up because I find Millie an interesting character and can always use more fun in my life.

A pianist, Mr. Dong-sik Kim, reads a newspaper story to his wife about a man falling in love with his maid. Mr. Kim works at a factory of primarily female employees, as the piano accompanist for the factory's extracurricular choir group.[a] Mr. Kim is popular among the women at the factory. One of them, Kyeung-Hee 'Miss Cho' Cho, pressures her friend to write a letter to Mr. Kim, pouring over how much she is infatuated by him. This ends poorly, as her friend is subsequently fired from the factory. Miss Cho attempts to further pursue Mr. Kim by taking up his offer of piano lessons, which he proposed to help earn more income during his wife's pregnancy.

Mr. Kim has just moved into a two-story house with his pregnant wife and two children, much larger than their previous residence. Mrs. Kim, also supporting the family as a dressmaker, becomes too exhausted to clean the house, and so Mr. Kim asks Miss Cho if she can find a woman who would be interested in becoming Kim's housemaid. Miss Cho returns with Myung-Sook, a cleaner from the factory. She behaves strangely as their new housemaid, catching rats with her hands, teasing the Kim children, and spying on Mr. Kim while he lays with his wife and gives Miss Cho piano lessons.

At the factory, Miss Cho learns that her friend has committed suicide after being fired, due to being overcome by the pressure of not being able to secure a new job. Distraught, Miss Cho confesses later that day to Mr. Kim that she was actually the one in love with him, not her friend. Miss Cho then attempts to fling herself at Mr. Kim, who rejects her. Myung-Sook watches this entire encounter from afar. She uses this as her opportunity to make a move, threatening to blackmail Mr. Kim over what she saw of him and Miss Cho. Distraught, Mr. Kim succumbs to her and the two engage in an affair.

Myung-Sook feels ill as the weeks pass, revealing her pregnancy by Mr. Kim. Mr. Kim eventually decides to come clean to his wife, and despite her initial depression over the affair, she devises a plan in which she has Myung-Sook thrust herself down the stairs that lead to the second story. This successfully results in her having a miscarriage. After this incident, Myung-Sook's behavior becomes increasingly erratic. She threatens to kill Mr. Kim's newborn son. Mrs. Kim fights her off as she tries to grab the baby. Myung-Sook then offers Mr. Kim's other son water, and after he drinks it, she says that she has poured rat poison into it. As she tells him this, he panics and falls to his death down a flight of stairs. Myung-Sook later states that it was just normal tap water.

Instead of turning her in to the police, Mrs. Kim offers to support Myung-sook in order to keep her from losing her job and damaging Mr. Kim's reputation in the fallout, saying that Myung-Sook can have anything she wants; Myung-Sook then asks to have Mr. Kim. She forces him to move upstairs into her room while Mrs. Kim labors over her sewing machine, falling asleep at her work every day. Unable to stand their new arrangement, both the wife and daughter attempt to poison Myung-sook, to no avail. Myung-sook persuades Mr. Kim to commit suicide with her by swallowing rat poison on the grounds that she will not harm anyone else in his family. He crawls downstairs and dies next to his wife, asking her to "Take good care of the children."

The film ends with the composer reading the story from a newspaper with his wife, returning to the very beginning of the film. The film's narrative has apparently been told by the composer, who then warns the audience that this is the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.

Comparing the director to Luis Buuel, 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.[2]

It's owing entirely to my own poor memory that I ever learned of the unexpected connection between Colette's Chri and M. John Harrison's In Viriconium, the former being a French novel from 1920 about a May-December romance between a middle-aged courtesan and her best friend's twenty-five-year-old son, the latter being the third in sci-fi legend M. John Harrison's Dying-Earth Viriconium series, released in 1982.

Of the two, I've only read Chri (if I am being scrupulously honest, I only decided to read it after the Michelle Pfeiffer/Rupert Friend movie came out in 2009. It was the FS&G reissue of the Senhouse translation. If I am being even more scrupulously honest, it says something about me that the most memorable line from a book almost entirely about sex and love was, for me, a description of breakfast). Back in 2017, almost all of Chri had vanished from my brain, and only the idea of "housemaid's coffee" remained. I began to worry I had invented the whole thing, until finally I stumbled on the right key search terms and found the relevant passage:

"Housemaid's coffee" sounds very much like that fortunately-departed genre of invalid food, which is mostly just different methods of combining milk and bread, like sops and sippets and milk-punch, or for the really adventurous, a soft egg custard. M.F.K. Fisher's An Alphabet for Gourmets says that "[Milk toast] has been a source of reassurance and moral and physical strength for hundreds of years, I am sure, and like many such friends, it perhaps does its best work when eaten in solitude." It's the sort of food I like the idea of (nourishing, simple, hearty, fortifying, a byproduct of a wholesomer age than this one) much more than I like to eat.

Then I forgot about the whole thing for a good five years. At this point the idea reemerged as "housemaid's tea," once again all memories of Colette left me, and I once more took to Twitter for help. The plot (much like housemaid's coffee!) thickened at this point, when someone else remembered a strikingly-similar passage from M. John Harrison's In Viriconium, published some sixty-two years later:

I've never come across this idea in any other book, or anywhere online for that matter. I suppose it's possible that this was once a popular drink among European housemaids, but somehow the only remaining references to it are in these two books. That seems unlikely! I'm more inclined to think that either Harrison snuck in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Colette out of cheek, or that he himself read Chri ages ago and forgot where he'd picked up the idea.

I'm willing to bet that the thoroughness and assiduity with which a 1920s-era housemaid at a chic house in Paris might crumble thickly-buttered toast into well-sugared milk beats my strategy of cutting the toast into cubes and tossing them in the milk in handfuls. It looked bad.

After a few minutes, the cubes weren't getting any crumblier, so I introduced an immersion blender into the equation. This solved my "wet crouton" problem but introduced a new problem: Incredible density. It was like carpentry glue. And no matter how long it glurgled and bubbled on the heat, there was no crust forthcoming, succulent or otherwise. Totally crustless sludge. Smelled pretty good, though.

The best way I can describe the final result is "French horchata." I can see myself liking this in the 19th century, when there's not better food available! Obviously this is not coffee. It does not do what coffee does. But it's warm, and hearty, and I could see myself nursing this peacefully while I beat some rugs with those old-fashioned tennis rackets.

I would not make this again, but if I were a housemaid who relied on this beverage every day to get me through work, I would add more milk to start with, and crumble the toast in finely to begin with, to try to avoid making porridge. If you can remember any made-up-sounding food you've only ever heard about through books, send it my way and I'll try my best to recreate it.

The under housemaid was usually a young girl, whose work was supervised by the senior maid. We know at Shibden that girls came to work in the household from the age of 12, and maybe younger. They had many of the dirtier jobs which were given to them by the senior maid.

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