Available on DVD: “The Housemaid”

Jeon D-yeon and Lee Jung-jae in The Housemaid

Sex, power, class and money — these are the forces swirling around an opulent but hauntingly austere South Korean household in The Housemaid, a lurid cocktail of titillation and betrayal that never quite lives up to its intoxicating potential. An admiring, clever remake of Kim Ki-young’s legendary film of the same title from 1960, this version, directed by Im Sang-soo, is at once more explicit than the original and less kinky. Rather than sweep, with Buñuelian mischief, from melodrama to black comedy to surrealist pastiche, it hesitates among those possibilities, as if unable to calculate the proper ratio of sincerity to camp.

The story, in any case, is ripe with both, and Im’s voluptuous visual palette combined with the dexterity of his cast is enough to hold your interest and, at times, to make you hold your breath. The opening scene, which takes place in a workaday urban world, strikes a deceptive note of realism and introduces the main character, Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon), who quickly leaves behind her job at a noodle shop to go to work for a wealthy family.

Jeon, recently seen in the role of a devastated mother in Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, is a virtuoso of suffering. With her wide eyes, tiny frame and delicate features, she projects both naïve vulnerability and a reserve of stubborn, wily toughness. The innocent maid at the mercy of corrupt masters is an old theme in literature and movies, pornographic and otherwise, and Im nods both at the sentimental Jane Eyre side of the tradition and at its more Gothic, even Sadean, manifestations.

Eun-yi’s friendly smile brings some sunshine into the shadowed world of her rich employers. The husband, Hoon (Lee Jung-jae), a powerful business executive and gifted amateur pianist, is the only man (apart from a few silent flunkies) in a universe managed, though not exactly ruled, by women. He is the celestial body around which various female satellites orbit: his young, all-seeing, scarily articulate daughter; his wife, Hae-ra (Seo Woo), pregnant with twins; his socially ambitious mother-in-law (Park Ji-young); and Mrs. Cho (Youn Yuh-jung), the senior servant whose guile, bitterness and temperamental instability almost make her, rather than Eun-yi, the title character.

What happens is shocking without being entirely unpredictable. To use an archaic, not-quite-appropriate term, Hoon seduces Eun-yi, and she welcomes his advances, even though their predatory nature puts them in the neighborhood of rape.

Eun-yi pursues their affair with a determination that seems both simple-minded — can she really believe that this entitled, cynical man, however dashing he might seem, is in love with her? — and ruthlessly cunning. Eventually she is exposed to the furious jealousy of the other women, each of whom has a reason to be threatened by the eager-to-please new servant and to want her out of the picture.

Im uses low-angled shots and rich, saturated tones that recall the glories of ’50s Technicolor and create an atmosphere tinged with suspense and heavy with eroticism, both implicit and literal. Sex and violence hover constantly in the air even when not much seems to be happening, and the psychological center of gravity shifts from one character to another in a way that is both pleasurably disorienting and a bit distancing. We are sometimes plunged, with Eun-yi, into a world of hidden agendas and covert feelings, but at other times we observe its workings through he director’s amused, objective eye.

Im works in a style that is at once restrained and outrageous. An earlier film, The President’s Last Bang, based on the final days of President Park Chung-hee of South Korea, who was assassinated in 1979, managed to be both a sober procedural and a bloody, hilarious farce. The Housemaid saves most of its craziness for the end — two final scenes that seem to come out of nowhere, even as they make glaringly overt the dramatic extremity and phantasmagorical invention that had previously seemed to lurk just outside the frame.

Until those moments The Housemaid generates intrigue partly by making you guess which movie it is going to become: the cruel psychological thriller, the comedy of upper-crust manners, the feminist fable, the erotic romp. That it manages to be each of these in turn testifies to Im’s skill but also turns out to be a limitation, since the film is, in the end, an exercise in thwarted and confused desire.