The Housemaid

An extraordinary film anywhere, not least in Korea, this heightened melodrama is often cited as the uneven maverick Kim Ki-Young's masterpiece. It's a deliberately overblown, if deadpan and Hitchcockian tale of a music teacher's demise through the twin agencies of his wife's greed (she wants a two-storey house) and his maidservant's supposed sexual predatoriness (she comes on like Kathleen Byron in Black Narcissus). Kim's is a bleak, Nietzschean view of human motivation, and the whole, with its jazz-score, location shooting, hot-house Sirkian drama and Clouseau-like horror suspense makes for a notably delirious experience.