The upwardly mobile Kim family employs a young woman to help manage their new house. Mr. Kim
begins an affair with the nameless 'housemaid' who soon drags the entire family into a
terrible tragedy. The director Kim Ko-young played a formative part in South Korean cinema's
"Golden Age" of the 1960s and 1970s his 1960 masterpiece Hanyo (The Housemaid) rescued and
restored after almost being lost is today widely regarded as one of the greatest South Korean
films of all time. Directors such as Park Chan-wook Im Sang-soo Kim Ki-duk Ryu Seung-wan and
Kim Jee-woon have all praised the film and Bong Joon-ho has referred to Hanyo as "the Citizen
Kane of Korean cinema " citing it as an inspiration for his film Parasite (2019). In this
book Youngmin Choe argues that Hanyo encapsulates the mood of social change in postwar South
Korea during the period of tremendous upheaval and rapid transformation that followed the
devastating war which divided families across the newly formed Cold War boundaries. The
housemaid - a figure that Kim Ki-young would explore repeatedly throughout his career - was a
young woman driven by greed and envy a femme-fatale set loose on the middle-class home. A
monstrous embodiment of the destructive desires of capitalism which recklessly eroded the
foundations of tradition this housemaid served as the conscience of a period that otherwise
leaned heavily into economic transformation pointing to the anxiety that undergirded what
might be otherwise regarded as a time of 'progress'. Going beyond the traditionalist approaches
that resist feminist readings of Hanyo Youngmin Choe insists that the enduring legacy of
Hanyo is both due to its uncanny aesthetics and - though it certainly was not intended to be an
explicitly feminist film - in the questions it raises about class mobility gender oppression
and women's work.
