Cinema DNA

The Housemaid

1960 · Directed by Kim Ki-young · South Korea

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The Housemaid stays at home, so far

South Korea 1

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The Housemaid poster

South Korea · 1960

Influenced 1 film

1 film

Films it shaped

Parasite 2019 · Bong Joon-ho Atlas note Paramount+

Atlas note · South Korea → South Korea

Bong Joon-ho has said Lee Chang-dong taught him that genre films could carry the weight of social critique without becoming lectures, that entertainment and political anger could share the same frame. Burning and Secret Sunshine are the films that built the tradition Parasite sits inside. Bong has been just as explicit about Hitchcock: the slow infiltration of the Bates house in Psycho, the camera delving ever deeper into a structure that hides something terrible, was his model for how Parasite leads you through the Park family's home, and the film's mid-point swerve from comedy to horror echoes Psycho's own notorious genre rupture. But the deeper ancestor is Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960), a Korean film about class resentment in a domestic space, which Bong has called the founding text of Korean cinema. It's on MUBI.

This DNA runs 2 films deep: The Housemaid Parasite Saltburn

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