The Original Housemaid (1960)

Fantastic post on the original The Housemaid by Jake (warning: spoilers!):

Lee Eun-shim gives one of the most terrifying performances ever put to celluloid. Her housemaid is a mysterious, abominable virago, not so much seducing the husband as brutally forcing his hand before the cards are even dealt. Lee has a round face, but when she contorts in inexplicable rage, her face tapers, sharpening from the wide top half (as if her skull must always make room for her saucer-like eyes) to a suddenly rigid jawline. Thus, she takes on a vaguely amorphous makeup, a spectral whirlwind all the more unknowable for the fact that Lee apparently never appeared in another film (coming across information on her is all but impossible). Perhaps seeking to distinguish between the working class he left behind (and the one the maid represents) and his new bourgeois aspirations, the patriarch forbids his servant from touching the piano, but she regularly does so anyway, her childish, random pounding of keys serving as diegetic tension to complement the bending, squawking reeds of the soundtrack. She has the ability to simply appear, and her ostensible dim-witted nature gives way to a cunning that always outguesses the family. Lee makes both the simple and the insolubly complex aspects of her character equally real, and equally troublesome.

It’s fascinating to read his analysis, since so recently I saw both the remake (review here), and the original.

Go check it out.

UPDATE: Netflix does not carry the original, unfortunately. Currently, it can be seen at MUBI, for free. All you have to do is sign up.