REVIEW:The Handmaiden (18)

Transposing the action to Japanese-controlled Korea in the 1930s, the film sees him transform Waters’ Victorian-set lesbian crime saga into a bold, beautiful and way-out-there female revenge story that eschews the bloodless nature of most costume dramas to revel in the lusty passions and digit-dicing proclivities of its main characters.

Told – as the novel was – from multiple perspectives, it’s a story with audacious twists and turns and Park handles the convoluted tale of a young, streetwise maid who falls for the mistress she’s supposed to be defrauding with the kind of verve that makes Tarantino’s most recent work so thrilling and unusual. Replete with graphic sex scenes and ripe melodrama, The Handmaiden also has all the hallmarks of an erotic thriller, but it comes with an explicit feminist bent that celebrates the way its protagonists find strength in each other as they push back against the twisted realities imposed on them by the men in their lives.

For Japanese heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) that’s her Korean uncle Kouzoki (Cho Kin-Won), who has sequestered her in an elaborate mansion that functions as a shrine to Japan and the west – as well as to his collection of erotic literature that he regularly shares with his creepy all-male libertine book group. For the younger Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), a pickpocket and grifter recruited to work in Lady Hideko’s house, it’s the boorish Count Fukinawa (Ha Jung-woo), whose sense of entitlement blinds him to the fact that he’s not as smart as the women he’s attempting to exploit. Nothing is quite what it seems here, something emphasised by the hidden layers of meaning encoded within the film’s sumptuous production and costume designs.

On general release.