What to expect
Kim Ki-young turns stairs, poison, domestic appliances, and cramped rooms into a feverish architecture of class anxiety. Its melodrama is deliberately excessive, exposing the household’s respectability as both aspiration and trap.
How to ease in
Accept the heightened behaviour and follow the house itself: upstairs, downstairs, kitchen, workroom. Each boundary represents both status and access, and the film keeps making those divisions unstable.
Heads-up
A music teacher hires a housemaid, and the family’s new middle-class home becomes a volatile system of desire, labour, and revenge.
The new house is supposed to prove that the family has arrived, yet every staircase multiplies danger. I watch comfort turn into surveillance one landing at a time.
Open the note ↓
The new house is supposed to prove that the family has arrived, yet every staircase multiplies danger. I watch comfort turn into surveillance one landing at a time.
— Momo
Credits & versions
- Cast
- Kim Jin-kyu — Piano teacher · Ju Jeung-nyeo — His wife · Lee Eun-shim — Housemaid · Um Aeng-ran — Miss Cho
- Screenplay
- Kim Ki-young · Kim Jeong-sook
- Production
- Kim Ki-young
- Cinematography
- Kim Deok-jin
Version map
Where to go next
Want a gentler, shorter, or stranger next film?
Ask Momo for something like this →
Momo is on shift. Visit Momo Cinema →
