The story focuses on Eun-yi, played by Jeon Do-yeon, who becomes involved in a destructive love triangle while working as a housemaid for an upper-class family.

[2] The film opens with a bustling city street, where a young woman commits suicide by jumping from a building ledge.

Eun-yi, who works in a restaurant, persuades her coworker and roommate to drive her to the scene of the suicide, and she stands distraught over the chalk outline where the woman's body had lain.

The next morning, an older woman named Byeong-sik visits her small apartment and later expresses interest in giving her a job.

Mi-hee then visits the family and stages an "accident," resulting in Eun-yi falling from a ladder positioned at the top of a set of stairs.

One major difference between the versions is that the original film took place in the middle class, while the remake is set in an extreme upper-class environment.

Im explains this with South Korea's social structure around 1960, which was a time when the country's middle class started to form and many poor people moved from the countryside to work in the cities: "women became housemaids who served not only for the rich but also the middle class and that issue had served as the basis to Kim Ki-young's work.

At first glance, the light fixture looks like an elegant Art Nouveau craft, but a closer look reveals that its green glass pieces are actually sharp shards from broken wine and soju bottles.

In the same sense, the high-class family members in the movie look elegant at a glance but are actually selfish and cruel enough to break their housemaid's heart.

Released by Sidus FNH, it opened on 679 screens and topped the box office chart for the first weekend with a revenue corresponding to around $5.7 million.

[16] Following the screening in Cannes, Maggie Lee of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "a flamingly sexy soap opera whose satire on high society is sometimes as savage as Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie".

However, Lee also found the film to have several prominent flaws: "plot developments are glaringly melodramatic" and "even with Jeon's calibrated performance, Eun-yi's characterization is problematic...[T]he absence in motivation of her behavior does not really convince".

[17] Lee Hyo-won of The Korea Times was all praises, saying that Im "brings a sexy, seamlessly quilted film that throbs with intrigue, lively characters and finely crafted melodrama".

[18] In 2014, it made Time's list of "Top 12 Female Revenge Movies" along with another South Korean film Lady Vengeance; with the review "the grim, gleaming Housemaid has a silky thread of tension tightening around the viewer's rooting interest, right up to the cutting revenge Eun-yi takes on her torturers.

"[19] Beth Accomando of KPBS described the story as "a seductive and disquieting thriller in which overt violence is rare but ruthless manipulation and a callous lack of concern for people are commonplace.

[20] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100 based on 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".