A composer teaches music to women working in factories while his wife toils at home as a seamstress to earn her family a few extra dollars. When she collapses from exhaustion, the composer decides to hire a maid who catches his eye and proceeds to turn his seemingly stable family life upside-down. After its initial success, the film remained largely unnoticed until a 1997 retrospective at the Pusan International Film Festival. The Housemaid inspired Cahiers du cinéma critic Jean-Michel Frodon to declare “the discovery of a film like The Housemaid…is a marvelous feeling—marvelous not just because one finds in writer-director Kim Ki-young a truly extraordinary image-maker, but in his film such an utterly unpredictable work. So Luis Buñuel had a Korean brother!”