하녀 (The Housemaid)

Bong Joon-ho has named Kim Ki-young's film as decisive, has campaigned for its restoration, and has said it is where he learned what a staircase is for. The inheritance is exact. A middle-class household admits a working-class outsider as domestic help; the house itself, on two levels, becomes the diagram of the class relation; the intrusion turns from service to leverage to violence; and the film refuses to hand anybody the moral high ground, including the people it is on the side of. Parasite's vertical geography, its downpour that runs from the rich house to the poor one, and its refusal of a redemptive ending are all arguments Kim was making in 1960 in a single house.

Made the year after Woman of Fire and by the same director, out of the same material: a young woman taken into a wealthy household, a wife who manages the arrangement, and a house that consumes all three of them. It is not a remake, which is why this is an influence rather than one. The Housemaid's plot is broken up and reassembled around a bar hostess rather than a servant, and the grotesque comedy is much further forward. Kim's three-house cycle is usually discussed as a set, and Insect Woman is the film that shows the pattern was a preoccupation rather than a property being reused.

Kim Ki-young remade his own 1960 film twice, and Woman of Fire is the first of the two. The premise is repeated almost exactly: a composer's household takes in a young woman from the country as help, an affair follows, and the house is destroyed from inside by what it did to her. The staircase, the piano, the poison and the two-storey house that traps everyone in it are all reused. What changes is the colour, the period and the ending's degree of ambiguity. Kim went back a third time in 1982, which is unusual enough on its own: three versions of one story by one director across twenty-two years.