With Angel, Become an Evil Woman, Kim has reinvigorated his familiar materials by splicing into them a different kind of story. The idea of having two disaffected spouses swapping plans to murder the other’s partner is something Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train (1951) had taken from Patricia Highsmith. Kim spliced the story of two women seeking revenge on two men into the relationship between a married man, his mistress and his wife. The result makes for, to put it mildly, a very complex film, one that the director ultimately decided to shelve. Yet the starring role played in it by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung has finally prompted the film’s revival. So we are left with the question: was Kim right to withhold ‘An Experience To Die For, Angel, Become an Evil Woman’, or are we right to want access to his final film?

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Myungja (Youn Yuh-jung) has come to the big city looking for work and, just maybe, a husband. When a well-dressed lady seems to offer the possibility of helping on both scores, she agrees to work for her family as an all-purpose maid servant. The father of the family, a handsome if weak-willed composer of cheesy pop songs will prove an easy prey when Myungja sets about dismantling the family’s fragile respectability.

The film is known as the first of various remakes by Kim Ki-young of his 1960 masterpiece The Housemaid. It is just as famous for signaling the debut of Youn Yuh-jung. Kim prefigured a new genre of ‘hostess’ films: tales of young country women who come to the city full of hope only to be abused by nice middle-class fathers/employers, often ending up working  in bars or brothels or simply dead. But Kim ironically reverses the poles, setting the young woman loose, both here and in the earlier film, to ‘ruin’ both patriarch and his family.

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