Director: Im Sang-soo
Class tension curdles into something far darker in The Housemaid, a South Korean crime drama from director Im Sang-soo built around a wealthy household that cannot keep its secrets contained.
What is The Housemaid about?
A composer and his wife bring a new housemaid into their home, and the arrangement seems ordinary enough until loyalties inside the household start to shift in ways nobody can fully control. As favoritism, resentment, and desire tangle together behind closed doors, the film tracks how quickly a domestic hierarchy can invert once one person stops playing their assigned role. What begins as a story about service and status turns into something closer to a slow-motion collision, with every character convinced they're the one steering events.
Cast & crew
Jeon Do-yeon carries the film in the title role, playing a woman whose composure hides far more than it reveals, opposite Lee Jung-jae as the composer at the center of the household's unraveling. Youn Yuh-jung and Seo Woo add sharp, unsettling energy to the extended family circling the main couple, while Ahn Seo-hyun, Park Ji-young, Hwang Jeong-min, and Moon So-ri fill out a cast built for quiet, loaded scenes rather than big confrontations.
Context & significance
The Housemaid comes from director Im Sang-soo, known for using domestic settings to expose class friction that Korean cinema has returned to again and again over the past two decades. The film's cool, controlled visual style and its focus on a single household give it a chamber-piece intensity, closer to a stage play than a sprawling crime saga.
Where & how to watch
The Housemaid streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Farsi subtitles, giving Persian-speaking audiences full access to a film that leans heavily on tone and dialogue. The page itself is free to browse, and watching only requires logging into a K-Time account.