The man is a musician who teaches music to young women factory workers. Korea in those days was urbanizing rapidly, and many country kids moved to the city in search of work and excitement. The music teacher's wife is pregnant and their trendy Western-style house is still under construction, so one of his students moves out of her factory dormitory to become their maid. Before long she and the teacher are having an affair, and when the maid becomes pregnant she decides she wants to be in first place. When that fails, she plots revenge. What makes The Housemaid so memorable is Kim's expressionistic style -- it's not at all like other Korean films of the period; it's like Hitchcock, maybe, but looser; maybe Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidatefellatio -- fact!) Goh's mother-in-law soon learns about the goings-on, and intervenes, first by knocking Eun-yee off a ladder as she's cleaning a chandelier. Mrs. Goh, hugely pregnant, rises from reading The Second Sex in bed to drag a golf club upstairs to Eun-yee's room, but can't bring herself to dash her rival's brains out -- yet. The good-hearted Eun-yee, unlike Kim's housemaid, doesn't want anything except a baby of her own; but her upper-class captors won't let her off so easily. At last she decides she wants revenge, but even then she turns it inward on herself, rather than on her tormentors. Kim's sexual and class politics have been turned inside out and on their heads. Kim reportedly told an interviewer that he aimed his version at