Eight years after his retrospective at the Pusan International Film Festival stunned cinephiles, Korean director Kim Ki-young finally reaches Boston. The Housemaid (1960), a popular work from the early phase of Kim’s career (which lasted till 1995), tells the cautionary tale of a circumspect music teacher and bourgeois family head who finds he can’t keep his hands off the new maid. Accumulating images of isolation and entrapment with much visual flair, the film is a model melodrama reminiscent of Douglas Sirk, John M. Stahl, and Mexican-period Luis Buñuel.

Like those directors, Kim uses melodrama for social critique. In the later stages of the film, the selfish and destructive maid becomes understandable as the sympathetic victim of class oppression, whereas the frail wife, hitherto a symbol of goodness, becomes more monstrous than any of the other characters as she takes charge of disposing of the problem created by her husband’s infidelity. Kim’s version of melodrama is rarely far from horror, especially in the last section, but as lurid as it gets, The Housemaid is never anything but the logical working-out of a terrifying design. In Korean with English subtitles. (black and white/107 minutes)