Hanyo (The Housemaid)

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 Wa