Woman of Fire

Kim Ki-young’s delirious riff on his own The Housemaid (1960) takes the domestic powder keg and relocates it to a sweltering poultry farm, then lights a match. A maid (Minari’s Oscar-winning Youn Yuh-jung in her debut role) moves in, the wife starts seeing red, and pretty soon the poultry isn’t the only thing getting butchered, as class resentment, erotic obsession, and murderous jealousy spiral out of control. The camera lunges, the colors scream, and baroque décor plus claustrophobic framing push melodrama into the realm of the grotesque, turning the home into a pressure cooker of postwar ambition and anxiety. Part art film, part grindhouse nightmare, Woman of Fire is a cornerstone of 1970s Korean cinema that still plays like the wildest midnight movie you’ve never seen. Digitally mastered in 2011 under the supervision of the Korean Film Archive. Digitization sourced from the only surviving 35mm print, which is in poor condition and includes embedded French subtitles.