Family squabbles exacerbate Insiang’s demonstrative compression, giving rise to the anger and extreme emotions born from a steady escalation of physical assault, betrayal and domination. The interior of Insiang’s home, severely cluttered and undesirably open (its primitive kitchen is mere feet from its ostensible bathroom, and there is little to obscure the view from either), sets the stage for seemingly inevitable intrusion. While contending with her frequently breached privacy — literally in her home and as a matter of social fact in a town that seems to thrive on gossip and scandal — Insiang is also oppressed by her professed boyfriend, Bebot (Rez Cortez), who harbors dubious intentions of his own. Further complicating matters for Insiang, as with most in the community, is a life burdened by not only relative disharmony but also a painful, collective idleness, often discussed but rarely assuaged. “In the background,” writes critic Phillip Lopate, “is a third suitor for Insiang’s hand, Nanding [Marlon Ramirez], a serious, studious boy — and, of course, she barely notices him. He is the one who keeps telling her she must ‘leave this place,’ as he has every expectation of doing.” But will he? Will any of them? In its culmination of personal and cultural variance, Brocka’s film has often been compared to Luis Bunuel’s Los olvidados (1950), another feature where poverty and despondency reign, where there is a similar sense of socioeconomic stagnation, and where the pervasive hardships foster baser instincts. 

Shot in just three weeks, under less than ideal circumstances, including a deterring curfew, Insiang exudes what historian Pierre Rissient calls a “raw brutality.” It also accentuates, in its narrative and in the case of its theatrical release, the entwined, embattled connection between social and political influence. Insiang was not well-received in 1976 Philippines, eliciting the contempt of Imelda Marcos, wife of then president Ferdinand Marcos, who decried the harsh and ugly (if genuine) depiction of a nation the political couple strove to present in the most flattering way possible, even if that meant encouraging blatant falsehoods. Though it became the first Filipino production to play at the Cannes Film Festival, the film faced governmental censorship from the Marcos regime and failed at the box office, resulting in the bankruptcy of Brocka’s production company. 

A subtler affront to prevailing socioeconomic standards is present in the fundamental premise of The Housemaid, which hinges on the Kim’s expanding home, the necessity of multiple sources of income and by the simple fact they can (barely) afford to hire a maid; and as in Sirk, a television entering the frame represents the defining object of modernity and contemporary comfort. Indeed, to the detriment of all involved, Dong-sik acquiesces to intimidation because of this precarious financial dependency, and at its understated core, the film is a scathing critique of hesitant economic development and shifting social advancement. More explicitly, though, it’s a film probing what Dong-sik refers to at the end of the picture, addressing the audience, as “primitive desires.” Kim Ki-young, born, as noted by professor Kyung Hyun Kim, “around 1920 in Seoul (in the south) but raised mainly in Pyongyang (in the north), before Korea was divided after World War II,” would later remake The Housemaid twice, as Fire Woman (1971) and Fire Woman ’82 (1982), but this iteration is most remarkable for its contemporary boldness. “[Reaching] beyond its glossy surfaces to question the validity of conservative family values and class divisions,” according to Kim, the film came out during a brief period of moderately lax censorship in Korea, which The Housemaid surely pushed the boundaries of, and although its epilogue feels like something of a “safety net,” in the words of Bong Joon-ho, a comic restoration of what has apparently been an imagined cautionary tale, there is no denying the visceral, sexual potency of what preceded this advisory finale. 

In essence, the erotic force of The Housemaid largely rests on the shoulders of Lee Eun-shim. Her Myung-sook is a beguiling temptress with unflappable impudence; she is an inescapable, stalking menace, associated by Bong to a quintessential femme fatal. Yet there is a remarkably twisted density to this young woman, first seen in the way she captures a rat and holds it with warped curiosity and devilish delight (her smoking habit should be the least of the family’s concerns), then progressively displayed by her impulsive, pathological and predatory vitality, feeding a film laden with conniving duplicity and suspicion, ultimately yielding to retribution and wrath. When Mr. Kim resists her enticements, she threatens him with an accusation of rape, but that is just a sampling of The Housemaid’s “rich sense of perversity,” as Martin Scorsese notes, and from there, the lives of all concerned spiral rapidly out of control, with frantic, drastic and horrifically fatal consequences. The stifling atmosphere crafted by Kim Ki-young is amplified by storms perpetually raging in the background, the mental and physical violence indoors punctuated by thundercracks outside, an ominous audiovisual articulation of the film’s tension, fueling its photographic intensity and heightened psychological expression. Both Scorsese and Bong applaud Kim’s formal control, particularly as it concerns, and radically manipulates, images and movement, and with piercing cinematography by Kim Deok-jin, the camera often underscores objects and faces with a penetrating uncertainty, striking a claustrophobic imbalance and augmenting a steady, anxious and lurid acceleration of seductive unease. The Housemaid has, like Insiang, also drawn comparisons to Luis Buñuel, as well as Alfred Hitchcock, and Scorsese and Bong both liken the picture to a horror film, which is, in nearly every regard, entirely suitable (testifying to its mosaic of formal and narrative characteristics, Bong also dubs the film a crime drama and melodrama).