The Illusionist Directed by Sylvain Chomet The Housemaid Directed by Sang-soo Im A Tati-esque magician’s tale, plus great moments in douchiness

The Illusionist is practically wordless, but the visual story it tells will warm your heart before it breaks it. This Oscar nominee for best animated feature was written and directed by The Triplets of Belleville’s Sylvain Chomet, adapted from an unproduced screenplay by the late French director Jacques Tati. The work, about an aging and increasingly unemployable magician, is a sort of valentine to Tati, with the main character sharing his birth name and, in one of the film’s neatest touches, Tati’s great Mon Oncle actually playing onscreen when the magician runs into a theater.

But you don’t have to be familiar with Tati’s work to be charmed. The Illusionist begins in 1959 Paris, as Jacques Tatischeff (Jean-Claude Donda) battles with clanking repairmen to hold a restless audience’s attention while a stage curtain is repaired, delaying the performance of a smoking, sharp-shouldered chanteause. After Jacques’ dismal act he irritates his fellow performers and stagehands by chasing his runaway and temperamental bunny backstage. He hopes a stint in London will be better—Jacques takes any gig offered, no matter how far the city or how small the venue—but he plays to a nearly empty house after the shrieking fans of prancing boy-band opener Billy Boy and the Britoons spill outside to further drool over the group.

From rainy London it’s on to rainy Edinburgh (Chomet’s precipitation is a thing of beauty, all persistent mist), where Jacques picks up at least one admirer: Alice (Eilidh Rankin), a young girl working in a dingy pub where he performs. She peeks into his room while mopping the hallway; he’s soon buying her a pair of shiny red shoes to replace the falling-apart boots that are barely holding onto her feet. When Jacques leaves the pub to move into a hotel that hosts vaudevillians, Alice stows away and attaches herself to him, enchanted by the magician’s seeming ability to conjure coins and gifts out of air. He allows her to stay with him and, in a fatherly way, keeps trying to provide her with every storefront nicety she affixes her wide eyes on. But, of course, Jacques doesn’t obtain these things by magic. And when his regular gigs no longer provide, he starts moonlighting at whatever job he can find, keeping his overtime a secret lest Alice realize he’s just a regular guy.

Chomet’s animation is quite similar to the more upbeat Belleville’s, with exaggerated characterizations and muted colors often wrapped in sharp black outlines. There are happy little touches throughout, from the way Jacques’ rabbit nips and grumbles at passersby; to a trio of acrobats who bound the hotel stairs while crying “Up up up up up!”; to a clown who rinses soap off his face with a squirting flower when water won’t flow from his sink. Most beguiling, though, is Chomet’s ability to tell a story with few words, even fewer of them in English: When Alice and Jacques check into a single-bed room, for instance, he points to a couch and says, “Moi?—zzz —lé,” and both the Scottish girl and the audience understands.

Those delightful details make The Illusionist’s last chapter all the more bittersweet. It’s amazing how expressive Chomet can be when Jacques decides his jig is up; the downward bend of a confused bunny’s ears in one of the final scenes is gut-wrenching. Certainly more people have heard of fellow Academy Award nominee Toy Story 3, but this film proves Pixar-worthy in its storytelling, animation, and ability to move a viewer to tears.

The Housemaid Directed by Sang-soo Im

She should have known it when she sucked him off. South Korea’s The Housemaid offers one of the douchebaggiest images ever committed to the big screen: As the young title character performs fellatio on her rich, spoiled boss, he outstretches his arms and flexes. It’s surprising that he’s not looking at himself in a mirror. What a dick.

This show of arrogance, though, is only a mild foreshadowing of what’s to come. The Housemaid is the slow-burning soap opera centered on Eun-yi (Do-yeon Jeon), a young woman who takes a job as a nanny and housekeeper to one of Seoul’s richest families. The similarly aged, princess-y wife, Hae-ra (Seo Woo), is ready to burst with twins and already has a precocious five-year-old, Nami (Seo-Hyeon Ahn). Hae-ra spends her days exercising, reading, and being bathed (Eun-yi and her superior, Ms. Cho, even wash Miss Thang’s hair) and her nights drinking wine and having sex with her husband, Hoon (Jung-Jae Lee).

But Hae-ra is not enough. Soon Hoon shows up at Eun-yi’s bedside, feeling her up and demanding that she remove the blanket covering her. It’s an uncomfortable scene, to say the least—until Eun-yi goes for it, apparently as hot for him as he is for her. That she genuinely likes Hae-ra and adores Nami (and even sweet-talks the babies in her mistress’ belly) doesn’t seem to be a factor. She’s glowing, and the curt Ms. Cho not only surreptitiously finds out why, she tells Hae-ra’s lioness mother.

A remake of a 1960 Korean thriller, The Housemaid was written and directed by Im Sang-soo with maximum stylishness (lots of aerial shots of the couple’s highly polished black-and-white mansion and its grounds) and tendency to infuriate (see: cocksucking). The theme (yes, some thrillers have a theme) is the divide between the rich and the working class—more specifically, the belief of the former that 1) money can make any problem go away and 2) they are outside the law. Their servants, meanwhile, crazily believe in the goodness of all humanity. Which means that Eun-yi thinks Hoon cares for her. And that, if anyone could possibly find out, no one would tell. But if that happens, all would be forgiven after a few heartfelt apologies, no?

Um, no. Eun-yi’s actions, as we all learned in Sex Ed, have consequences, and those consequences have consequences of the darkest sort. “Accidents” start to happen; everyone’s expression turns sour. The rabbit hole these people go down is twisted, compelling, and, somewhat sickeningly, believable—at least until the very end, which offers a finale that’s dramatic yet completely head-scratching. “Oh my fucking God, let’s get out of here!” a character says in reaction to the nearly apocalyptic coda. At that point, the audience will be ready to go, too.