the handmaiden korean movie review

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Park Chan-Wook’s “The Handmaiden” is a love story, revenge thriller and puzzle film set in Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. It is voluptuously beautiful, frankly sexual, occasionally perverse and horrifically violent. At times its very existence feels inexplicable. And yet all of its disparate pieces are assembled with such care, and the characters written and acted with such psychological acuity, that you rarely feel as if the writer-director is rubbing the audience’s nose in excess of one kind or another. This is a film made by an artist at the peak of his powers: Park, a South Korean director who started out as a critic, has many great or near-great genre films, including “Oldboy,” “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Lady Vengeance” and “ Thirst ,” but this one is so intricate yet light-footed that it feels like the summation of his career to date.

It’s also as inspiring an example of East-West cross-pollination as cinema has given us, on par with Akira Kurosawa ’s adaptations of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Dashiell Hammett in its ability to submerge a respected source while keeping its outlines visible. The plot faintly evokes many Gothic thrillers (chiefly "Rebecca," "Jane Eyre" and "Gaslight") and quite a few examples of film noir as well; Park’s source is Sarah Waters ’ Fingersmith , a 2002 novel set in Dickensian England that was previously made as a 2005 British miniseries. The result seems at once specifically English, specifically Korean and not of this astral plane; like Park’s best work, it’s an expressionistic, at times surreal movie that skates along the knife-edge of dreams. Every frame pulses with life, sometimes with blood.

The script tells of a spirited female pickpocket named Sooki, actually named Tamako ( Kim Tae-ri), who gets a job as a handmaiden at the estate of a rich old book collector (Lee Yong-nyeo), serving him and Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), the niece of his late wife; she gets pulled into a scheme by a fake count who wants to marry the niece and have her committed to an asylum so that he can claim her fortune; the book collector, the fake count’s mentor, has more or less the same plan in mind. “Frankly, I’m not that interested in money itself,” says the fake count, who was raised by a Korean fisherman but claims to be Japanese and calls himself Fujiwara ( Ha Jung-woo ). “What I desire is—how shall I put it?—the manner of ordering wine without looking at the price.”

The plan is fiendishly complicated, but it grows thornier still when Sooki/Tamako starts falling in love with her target. Their blossoming affair is tenderly observed—a startlingly blunt sex scene is delayed until fairly deep into the film, and preceded by many scenes that pivot upon subtle glances, overheard remarks, and moments where one woman rushes to the other’s defense. The fake count is handsome and can be dashing at times—Ha looks so at home in a tuxedo that you could imagine him wearing it to a supermarket—but he’s also pig who seems to revel in his piggishness, and his intended target sees through him immediately. When he calls her “mesmerizing” over a tense dinner, she replies, “Men use the word ‘mesmerizing’ when they wish to touch a lady’s breasts.” He’s upfront about his utter cyncism and lack of affection for Lady Hideko, a crushed flower of a woman who was raised from girlhood as a virtual prisoner by the book collector after—well, let’s just call it a tragedy, because now we’re at the point in this review where describing any specific moment or scene from “The Handmaiden” in detail would rob readers of one of the great pleasures of watching a densely plotted, elegantly executed motion picture: having no idea of what’s about to happen next, yet nearly always being surprised and enthralled by both the twist itself and the film’s presentation of it.

So here we go, somewhat vaguely, into the breach: nothing is what it seems in this movie, and the things that aren’t what they seem aren’t quite what they don’t seem to be, if that makes any sense at all (and if it doesn’t right now, trust me: it will). Most of the story takes place in and around the book collector’s country estate, a splendidly realized creation that’s not just one of the great mansions in film history—rivaled in recent movies only by the estate in another modern Gothic romance, “ Crimson Peak ”—but also an organizing metaphor for the whole film. It seems to change size and shape depending on a visitor’s angle of approach, and once you’re inside it, the geography at first seems so clear that you could draw floor plans of its most frequently used spaces; but after a few more scenes, you realize that you only saw a small part of the house, and not only are there rooms and wings you’ve never laid eyes on, there are secret doors and hidden passageways that only certain characters know about, leading to places where they can go to make love, commit sadistic acts of violence, or spy on each other. Soon enough, the movie teaches you how to watch it, and you start asking questions, like, “What does this person truly hope to gain from sneaking here, doing this, stealing that?” and “Are they really spying in secret, or do the spied-upon people know somebody is watching?" and “Are the emotions being expressed by that character real, or are they faking it, or are they seeming to fake it while actually feeling those feelings?”

A good many moments resonate not because of what one character is saying, but because of the looks on other characters’ faces as they hear their words and either contemplate their true meaning or visualize images to accompany them. One of many show-stopping setpieces is a reading of perverse erotica from the book collector’s library, accompanied by one of the weirdest sex shows in mainstream cinema, but most of the sequence’s eerie power derives from observing the rapt expressions of men who’ve gathered to hear explicit fiction read aloud. Nearly as powerful, though far subtler, are the cross-cut sequences that feel like self-contained short stories of their own. Dialogue or recited scraps of letters or fiction become de facto narration laid over a cascade of images, brilliantly composed for a very wide frame by Chung Chung-hoon, and backed by Cho Young-wuk’s hypnotically repetitive yet rapturously melodramatic score, which rises to operatic heights when the characters are experiencing misery, ecstasy or fear.

Park’s sense of texture and color seems as intuitive as a painter’s, but the film’s narrative construction is as right-brained as Christopher Nolan at his wonkiest. "The Handmaiden" is neatly diced into thirds, each approximately 45 minutes long, each narrated by a different major character with parenthetical mini-narratives embedded within each, Russian nesting doll-style. As you ease into the middle third, you start to see moments and images revisited from different angles, seen or heard from fresh vantage points, or picked up slightly earlier or slightly later, altering their meaning or revealing previously withheld facts. The result is a rare film that could be equally well-represented by a billboard-sized collage of randomly chose still-frames, and a flowchart. “Even listening to the same story, people imagine different things,” a character warns us, so deep into the movie that the line plays not like a revelation, but a confirmation of what we we’ve been feeling in our marrow.

As you might have deduced, “The Handmaiden” is a story that is also about storytelling, and writing, and picture making, and the obsessive-compulsive attention to detail that links so many great artists throughout history, regardless of medium, worldview or temperament. The movie is filled with literal and figurative nods to the act of artistic creation, from the loving close-ups of the book collector’s treasured volumes, the drawings and paintings made by Hideko and the fake count (he was originally hired to tutor her), and the shots of calligraphic sentences scratched onto letters and scrolls, to the way that blood spilled by lovemaking or disfigurement blooms upon mattresses and stone floors, rhyming with the lotus blossoms glimpsed in trees over the characters' heads, the eruptions of green that accompany transitions from indoors to outdoors, extreme closeups of voyeurs' eyeballs, and shots of a full moon so bright that it seems to be burning a hole through the clouds.

These touches are all striking in their own right. But they never feel ostentatiously disconnected from the story and characters. “The Handmaiden” is about a lot of things, among them trust and vulnerability, imprisonment and freedom, and the tension between the authentic self and the façade that individuals create, and that society imposes from without. Park never loses track of these ideas or forgets about them, but they never expressed in tediously rhetorical terms—always in a gliding, playful, often audaciously musical way. "The Handmaiden" stirs the senses by appealing to our gut feelings, our sense of morals and ethics, and our appreciation for the sight of great artists making magic as if it’s the easiest thing in the world.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

The Handmaiden (2016)

145 minutes

Kim Min-Hie as Lady Hideko

Kim Tae-Ri as Sook-Hee

Ha Jung-woo as Count Fujiwara

Cho Jin-woong as Uncle Kouzuki

Kim Hae-sook as Butler

Moon So-ri as Aunt of Noble Lady

Lee Dong-Hwi

• Park Chan-wook

Cinematography

• Chung Chung-hoon

Original Story

• Sarah Waters

Original Music Composer

• Young-wuk Cho

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The Handmaiden Is a Cinematic Masterpiece

Park Chan-wook’s new romantic thriller is a sumptuous tale of shifting identities, forbidden love, and colonialism.

The Handmaiden contains multitudes: It’s a sumptuous romantic period piece, as well as a sexy spy thriller, replete with secret identities and triple-crosses. It’s an extended commentary on Japan’s occupation of Korea in the 1930s, and it’s an intense piece of psychological horror from one of the masters of the genre, Park Chan-wook. But more than anything, The Handmaiden is just pure cinema, a dizzying, disturbing fable of love and betrayal that piles on luxurious imagery, while never losing track of its story’s human core. For Park, the Korean director of crossover genre hits like Old Boy and Thirst , the movie feels like an evolutionary leap forward in an already brilliant career.

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The film is, surprisingly enough, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith , a Victorian crime novel about a petty thief who gets entangled in a long con against a noblewoman, with whom she then falls in love (after that, many further twists ensue). Park and his co-writer Chung Seo-kyung have taken Waters’s investigation of Victorian repression and its limits on female empowerment, and translated it into a tale that delves into the dynamics of Korean culture during Japan’s pre-war occupation. This is a movie about the costumes people wear, both literal and psychological, and that focus extends outward to its setting, a peculiar mansion that mashes up Japanese and Victorian architecture. Park’s film is one where every gesture or period detail is loaded with double meaning, and where his heroines have to wrap their feelings in layers of deception just to try and survive.

The plot plays out the same way that Fingersmith does, following a a three-part structure where each successive chapter sheds new light on the last, and a series of three grand cons bound up into a larger, swooning tale of misandry, romance, and liberation. Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri, making her film debut) is a crafty young pickpocket plucked from a den of orphans to be the new handmaiden to a Japanese heiress, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee). She’s part of an elaborate scheme cooked up by the conman Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), who plans to marry the emotionally fragile Hideko for her money and then swiftly have her committed. Sook-hee is hired to facilitate his deception, manipulating Hideko into the Count’s arms, but of course, things don’t go exactly as expected.

Hideko is a prisoner in a gilded cage, a manse designed to reflect the culture of Korea’s occupying power, of which she is a prized example. In interviews , Park has said what fascinated him most about transposing Fingersmith to 1930s Korea was the opportunity to comment on the occupation. The chief villain of the piece, Hideko’s uncle-by-marriage, Kozuki, is a Korean intellectual who fetishizes Japanese culture—but he’s also keeping the Japanese Hideko under his thumb as some petty act of supremacy. While he delves into a budding romance between Hideko and Sook-hee, Park burrows into the twisted relationship between the two countries, and the foolishness of the Korean characters gunning for social ascendency by imitating the Japanese way of life.

The film’s dialogue is subtitled in two colors (Korean in white, Japanese in yellow) to underline the disguises the characters are constantly donning in their efforts to blend in. Park has never been a subtle director, which is why he’s worked so well with more lurid genres (most of his movies fall in the thriller or horror category). With The Handmaiden, he makes use of a smorgasbord of tropes and somehow gets away with it. It’s not every film that can feature astute historical commentary, explicit lesbian sex, prolonged bouts of torture, and a giant foreboding octopus without seeming ridiculous. But in The Handmaiden , each of these elements is as wonderfully surprising as the plot itself, which never lets the viewer guess what’s coming next.

The first part of the film charts Sook-hee’s manipulation of Hideko, a con job that turns into a seduction, and then, a seemingly authentic romance; the power dynamic is clearly tilted against the timid heiress. After 45 minutes, the story is abruptly inverted, then re-told through the eyes of Hideko, revealed as far more self-aware than initially imagined; for its third act, the film upends itself again, each time layering a deeper understanding of its four major characters. You might see each twist coming in isolation, but when they’re all knitted together, the effect is stupefying.

The Handmaiden ’s identity shifts as much as its sinuous ensemble; it’s as exciting to watch Park keep his grasp on its changing tone as it is to watch the characters double-cross each other. To say much more would spoil a dazzling climax, but this is at its core a tale of liberation, of costumes being thrown off, and of the delight (and terror) that comes with embracing one’s true self. The Handmaiden is long, occasionally demented, and intense enough that it won’t suit everyone. But it’s moviemaking that demands to be enjoyed, a thrill ride in service something far grander and more important.

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Review: ‘The Handmaiden’ Explores Confinement in Rich, Erotic Textures

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By Manohla Dargis

• Oct. 20, 2016

The art of the tease is rarely as refined as in “The Handmaiden.” Set in Korea in the 1930s, this amusingly slippery entertainment is an erotic fantasy about an heiress, her sadistic uncle, her devoted maid and the rake who’s trying to pull off a devilishly elaborate con. The same could be said of the director Park Chan-wook, whose attention to voluptuous detail — to opulent brocades and silky robes, luscious peaches and creamy shoulders — turns each scene into an invitation to ooh, aah and mmm. This is a movie that tries to ravish your senses so thoroughly you may not notice its sleights of hand.

It’s not for nothing that one of its heroines, Sookee (Kim Tae-ri), is a pickpocket, though that’s getting ahead of her story. It opens with Sookee weepily saying goodbye to some adults and wailing children, their gushing matched by the torrential rain. She’s off to work for Lady Hideko (a sensational Kim Min-hee), a pale beauty who lives with her tyrannical uncle, Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), a collector and purveyor of art and rare erotic books whose darting tongue has turned black from his ink pen. The realms of his bibliophilic senses are suggested when a client asks if one of his books is by the Marquis de Sade. “It’s Sade-esque,” the uncle says, all but winking at the audience.

The kinks grow more outré and twisted, the winks dirtier and broader. The uncle has raised Hideko from childhood, away from the world, intending to wed her for her fortune. He’s also turned her into a puppet, having trained her to read erotic fiction aloud for the delectation of his potential customers. Fate in the form of the con man (Ha Jung-woo) intervenes. Disguised as a count, he insinuates himself into the uncle’s home and seemingly into the niece’s affection, enlisting Sookee in the ruse as Hideko’s new maid. The count plans to marry Hideko and then ditch her, a plan that seems doomed when Sookee and Hideko’s lady-maid intimacy steams and then boils over.

The inspiration for all this intrigue is Sarah Waters ’s ambitious 2002 novel, “Fingersmith,” a lesbian romance set in Victorian Britain in which she slyly has her way with established literary themes like avaricious male guardians and cloistered female wards. In adapting the movie, Mr. Park, who wrote the script with Chung Seo-kyung, has moved the story to Korea during the Japanese occupation. This setting initially seems more thread than cloth, conveyed in the smatterings of soldiers who pass through the story and in the mixing of languages, although it also factors into the villainy of the uncle, a Korean who’s embraced a Japanese identity, asserting, “Korea is ugly and Japan is beautiful.”

Mr. Park is a genre virtuoso, known for thrillers like “ Oldboy ,” whose filmmaking is notable for its visual order and extreme violence, a combination that creates a seductive, at times unsettling aesthetic of immaculate frenzy. The violence in “The Handmaiden” tends to be more restrained than in some of his other work, more psychological and rather less blunt and bloody. A notable exception is some sadomasochistic whip-work that’s far more vigorous than is found in, oh, say, “Fifty Shades of Grey.” There’s also a characteristic Grand Guignol flourish toward the end that’s outrageous enough that you may find yourself at once laughing and gasping, only to hastily avert your eyes.

It’s one of the rare times you want to look away in “The Handmaiden,” which Mr. Park has turned into an emporium of visual delights. Part of Sookee’s journey is one from perdition into opulence, from a lowly thieves’ den into the sumptuousness of the mansion. Yet appearances remain deceiving, which is one of this story’s themes. Everything inside the manor and out has been calculated to enchant, from the grounds with their carpets of green and bursts of flowering trees to the interiors with their wood paneling and floral wallpaper. Nothing is more perfect than Hideko’s petal mouth with its lusciously carnal red lipstick.

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The Handmaiden Reviews

Park demonstrates how the complicated relationship between role-play, desire, secrecy, power and revenge prove ripe for darkly comic (and perverse) fodder.

Full Review | Dec 12, 2023

Beautiful images in the frame with a grotesc story about the survival in a context war. You have to watch it. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 31, 2022

It’s a beautiful film of quality and cleverness.

Full Review | May 19, 2022

Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden envelops the viewer in a clever con game of psychological duplicity, depraved predators, dark humor, and sordid sexual delights.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 9, 2022

While its a feat of technical brilliance and visual genius, its the way Park uses his story to force his audience to question their assumptions that made me speechless the first time I saw it.

Full Review | Feb 21, 2022

The Handmaiden is a remarkably progressive film that, despite using and abusing sex for the most part, refuses to objectify its subjects.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 2, 2021

Through the extremity of the story, Park manages to present a number of social messages, once more

Full Review | Apr 11, 2021

Whether you've seen it before or not, now's as perfect time as any to see what all the fuss is about while [director director Park Chan-Wook] begins filming his upcoming his romantic murder mystery Decision to Leave this year.

Full Review | Feb 25, 2021

The drama combines the sumptuous art direction and black humor of Park's past work with a warmth and compassion that feeds the soul.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2021

A complicated revenge story, ripe with detail and secrets.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 3, 2021

The Handmaiden is an epic illustration that there is perhaps nothing more human than inhumanity.

Full Review | Jan 4, 2021

The twists in The Handmaiden come fast and furious. It's an engrossing tale that will constantly have you guessing which direction the narrative is headed.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 30, 2020

Plenty of humor and an incomparably depraved, unyielding, violent, rebellious level of creativity.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 5, 2020

...the love between the two lead women is what drives this film.

Full Review | Nov 16, 2020

Throbbing with greed and passion, deception and betrayal, the story remains every bit as gripping on screen as it was on the page.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 16, 2020

A rapturously seductive slow burn watch.

Full Review | Oct 13, 2020

"[Park]'s clearly a believer in the Roger Ebert school of thought, which favors appreciation over deconstruction."

Full Review | Aug 28, 2020

After witnessing this spectacle of eroticism and betrayal, we officially confirm that there is Park Chan-wook's cinema for a while. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 26, 2020

The Handmaiden is ambitious, hypnotic, and elegantly constructed, even with all of its countless twists and misdirections.

Full Review | Apr 28, 2020

The Handmaiden Review: A Masterpiece of Intrigue and Erotica

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South Korean Director Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden is a chef-d'oeuvre of intrigue and erotica. It is a sumptuously artistic tale, exquisitely shot, that will leave you breathless. Park has obliterated boundaries in his career as a filmmaker. From Oldboy to Stoker, he has gone to dark and sensual places that others never dare tread. Adapted from the Victorian novel "Fingersmith" by Sarah Waters, The Handmaiden is the best foreign film I have seen this year by a mile.

The setting is updated to 1930's Korea under Japanese colonial rule. A Japanese heiress, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) lives an isolated life in the country. She is the virtual prisoner of her brutish uncle, Kouzuki (Jo Jin-woon). A slick con man , Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), has engineered an elaborate scam to steal Hideko's fortune. He enlists Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri), a nubile girl and master pickpocket, to be her devoted handmaiden. His plan, for Sook-Hee to subtly push the introverted Hideko into his clutches.

The Handmaiden is the most sexually explicit major release since Blue is the Warmest Color. Be forewarned, this one is a barn burner. Park stages titillating interactions that will melt your eyeballs and leave your heart a flutter. He is a master of tension in these scenes. From casual flirtation to full on flesh grinding, this is the definition of adult material. But it is not salacious or cheap. Seduction is an art and a science. As these characters explore each other, the narrative blurs and the mystery deepens. The sex is integral to the story.

The plot is clever and shrouded in layers. We see events from several points of view as the reveals play out. Park's script is spectacularly well-written. I'll liken it to The Usual Suspects or Fight Club . There's a lot going on the surface, but even more than you think once the veil is lifted. I was entranced by The Handmaiden from the opening frame. It has a long runtime, but will not bore you for a second.

The Handmaiden is a technical gem. The cinematography by Chung Chun-hoon is Oscar worthy . The film has a dreamlike quality. It swings from erotic fantasy to heartless violence like a pendulum. The country is bathed in fog, the palatial rooms, sinister and beguiling. The lighting blends seamlessly with the costumes and production design to devour your senses. I was particularly impressed with Park's use of long tracking shots to show the characters moving between spaces, sometimes surreptitiously. It really sold the effect that these people were sneaking around. Masterful techniques are on display here. Park and his production team are true auteurs.

I won't delve into the players. The characters motivations are key to enjoying this story. I will say that their performances are stirring and without abandon. Park's cast fully commits to this film in body and soul. Many actors would not have the nerve to do this. It's one thing to be naked on screen, but entirely more difficult to be naked , dramatic, and effective.

From Amazon Studios , The Handmaiden is required viewing for any true fan of cinema. This material is purely for discerning adults that can appreciate artistry on this level. Sniggering horndogs need not apply. Park has delivered a gothic, twisting, lesbian romance unlike any to grace the silver screen. I was blown away by this film.

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The Handmaiden Review: Sex, Lies and Riveting Escape

By Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino

Korean director Park Chan-wook is known for exploring themes of anger, madness, and revenge in his films—after all, he made a whole Vengeance Trilogy, which included the excellent cult hit Oldboy . But he’s quick to clarify that his newest film, The Handmaiden , an erotic psychological thriller, isn’t about revenge in the same way. In this film, “when [the villains] meet their comeuppances, it’s just punishment,” he says. The difference, perhaps, is that the main characters don’t intend to exact revenge on their tormentors; their goal is simply their own freedom. Through this, Park highlights the central theme of his newest film: “These women are liberating themselves from male oppression,” he explains. It’s a fittingly lofty theme for a film that’s ambitious—and nearly flawless—in every way.

The twists and turns of the plot are brilliant; Park has taken the storyline of Fingersmith , Sarah Waters’s Victorian thriller, and simplified it somewhat, better highlighting the message of female empowerment and love that the book offered, while adding additional surprises. But the film never feels overly complex, plotted so well that the story is unpredictable but never confusing. Like the beautiful house in which much of the film takes place—an architectural masterpiece of Eastern and Western styles that hides unsavory secrets—viewers will think they’ve got everything figured out, only for Park to reveal another hidden room, another facet to his story.

Park’s sex scenes are 90% exquisitely beautiful and 10% grotesque.

Sook-hee, a pickpocket in Japanese-occupied Korea, is recruited by a con man called Count Fujiwara to act as a handmaid for Lady Hideko, a rich, beautiful, and isolated Japanese heiress; Sook-hee is to slowly convince Hideko that she should elope with Count Fujiwara, at which point the two swindlers will put Hideko in an asylum and divide up her fortune. Hideko lives with her eccentric and obsessive uncle Kouzuki, who plans to marry her and use her inheritance to continue to finance his library of erotic texts, a collection he’s kept Hideko in service of since her childhood. On top of being lecherous exploiters of women, Fujiwara and Kouzuki are both Japanese sympathizers—or “colonial lackeys,” as Park calls them—adding another element of odiousness to their characters. Contrary to plans and their own expectations, the two women develop feelings for one another.

Park explained that he’s always wanted to make a film about a homosexual relationship, but he said, “I wanted to portray these characters in a way that they’re not very self-conscious about their sexual identity, and so that they’re not necessarily oppressed because of their sexual identity.” In The Handmaiden , it’s everything else in Sook-hee and Hideko’s lives that keeps them apart: their class differences, their opposing cultural backgrounds, and the complex plot that both are tangled in with Fujiwara. Although their sexual relationship is central to the storyline, it’s never explicitly addressed through a lens of deviant sexual behavior—in fact, it’s the film’s heterosexual desires that are portrayed as far more deviant.

Kim Jee-woon's 'Age of Shadows' is part spaghetti Western, part John Le Carré.

“Sometimes I wish I was a woman,” said Park when he introduced the film at a recent screening in New York. He described the skepticism he’s sometimes met with, that a male director could make a movie that successfully tells a love story between two women, and that features explicit lesbian sex scenes. It’s a criticism that Blue Is The Warmest Color director Abdellatif Kechiche also faced: that his sex scenes were voyeuristic, that they seemed produced for the male gaze, that you could tell they’d been imagined and directed by a man.

But to argue that a male director, no matter how talented, is incapable of creating an intimate sex scene between two women is to imply that there’s some inherent truth to womanhood that only women can access. Park’s sex scenes are like the rest of his scenes in The Handmaiden and in his other excellent films, like Oldboy , Stoker , and Lady Vengeance : 90% exquisitely beautiful and 10% grotesque.

In the film, the first erotic encounter between Sook-hee and Hideko is a scene in which Sook-hee rubs Hideko’s sharp tooth smooth with a thimble while she’s in her bath. It’s tender, intimate, and discomfiting all at the same time. The film’s depictions of sexual encounters with men (or those intended for male pleasure) are consistently unpleasant and shudder-inducing, even if they are visually stunning. In this film male sexuality is loathsome and despicable, selfish and greedy, something to be avoided and shunned. It’s the nature of this grotesqueness, contrasted with the beauty of Park’s set, costumes, and cinematography, that leaves the viewer feeling mildly uncomfortable, but that ultimately elevates Park’s sex scenes. They’re meant to do more than arouse the viewer, which is what makes the “male-gaze” criticism somewhat limited—and what makes The Handmaiden outstanding.

The Handmaiden (2016)

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Bilal Zouheir

What it's about.

The 2016 outing of South-Korean auteur director Park Chan-wook (maker of Oldboy and Stoker) once again shifts attention to the dark side of what makes us human: betrayal, violence, and transgression. Based on the 2002 novel Fingersmith by British author Sarah Waters, The Handmaiden revolves around the love of two women and the greedy men around them. Park shifts the novel's plot from Victorian London to 1930s Korea, where an orphaned pickpocket is used by a con man to defraud an old Japanese woman. Routinely called a masterpiece with comparisons made to the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, this is a stylish and meticulous psychological thriller that packs enough erotic tension to put a crack in your screen. If you love cinema, you can't miss this movie. You might even have to watch it twice.

quite a disappointment. as much it is praised, i find it boring and senseless. Alltough it looks nice, there are way better korean movies. Do not be fooled by the famous director, it is a boring remake with unreasonable sex and torture. I guess these elements were needed because of the lack of everything else.

Debbie Rickard

I thoroughly enjoyed the unfolding layers in this movie, which I did not expect. The characters were all equally interesting and I will be recommending it to my friends

anilambaniworks

you’re right.

This movie is beyond excellence. Every detail is perfect, and the plot keeps misleading you until the very end. However, you should watch this movie alone, as it does not lack explicit scenes, especially starring women only

sujanthereaper

Keeps you on the edge every moment. The climax is amazing. The mystery around the protagonists are portrayed very well. I like how our empathy shifts from one character to another as new truths are presented to us. We do not really know who has the upper hand till the end.

Anne Michaud

This movie was not for me. Although I agree that it was well-made, there was a lot of very explicit scenes. I enjoyed the varying points of view, but this film moved very slowly, and the ending was ridiculous.

This film is an absolute masterpiece, the music, the costumes and the filming are just outstanding.

Typically, I would hesitate to watch any movies that are over 2 hours long, but this movie so engaging. The cinematography was unlike any other and everything–the costume, the set, the hair–was so aesthetically pleasing. This movie is easily one of my favorite movies.

A wonderfully feminist film – and great on screen chemistry between the female actors.

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The Handmaiden is a crackerjack lesbian romance with con artists, octopi, and poison

The South Korean film isn’t just a great movie. It’s also a relentlessly entertaining one.

by Emily St. James

If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

The Handmaiden is a nearly flawless movie. Every frame, every movement of the camera, every performance feels perfectly calibrated for maximum effect.

It’s also a relentlessly entertaining movie. And that might not be your first thought when I talk about a perfect movie, or even a foreign-language movie. For whatever reason, too many American moviegoers think of these sorts of films as slow-moving, austere tales of gentle longing or what have you.

And, yeah, there are some (great!) films like that. But The Handmaiden is the furthest thing you could get from an austere tale of gentle longing.

It’s a rip-roaring tale of con artists trying to pull a fast one on a rich heiress, a passionate romance, and even a hilarious comedy — and it’s sometimes all of those in the same scene.

The Handmaiden isn’t just one of the year’s best movies; it’s one of the year’s most accessible movies.

The Handmaiden keeps the best stuff about a great novel and transports it to another land

The Handmaiden is based on Sarah Waters’s terrific novel Fingersmith . Waters, who is British, tends to write stories in classic British story forms — she has a fair number of ghost stories, and Fingersmith is a Dickensian pastiche — but reorient them to be about romantic relationships between two women.

And as in Fingersmith , The Handmaiden is about what happens when a female con artist conspires with a male con artist to pose as a servant to a rich young heiress. The idea is that our hero will prime the heiress to fall in love with the con man — and then the con man will confine the heiress to a madhouse after the two elope. The two con artists will split the heiress’s considerable fortune.

What nobody counts on is that our hero and the heiress will fall in love, which complicates everything.

The Handmaiden is filled with twists and turns, and for me to tell too much more would be robbing you of much of the fun of this story. But what I love about it is the way simply making the romantic relationship at its center be between two women — instead of the more frequently told tale of a con man falling in love with an heiress he means to rip off — opens up all sorts of emotional material in the story that a more traditional tale wouldn’t have been able to get to.

When our hero, Sookee ( Kim Tae-ri ), and the heiress, Hideko ( Kim Min-hee ), start to fall for each other, the movie becomes as much about love opening their eyes to how the men in their lives use and abuse them as it is about their connection. In The Handmaiden , love doesn’t just make you feel great — it also completely reorients your point of view on the universe.

The film also moves the action of Waters’s novel from Victorian England to 1930s Korea, which is under Japanese rule. This, too, opens up new facets of the story, allowing it to play with ideas of Koreans trying to pass themselves off as Japanese, the better to climb the social order.

The Handmaiden is one of the better arguments in recent memory for the idea that shifting a story’s context and setting can change everything about it. Fingersmith is a great novel, but The Handmaiden plays less like a direct adaptation and more like a really terrific cover version — one that shows you something new in a work of art you already loved.

None of The Handmaiden would work without director Park Chan-wook

South Korea’s Park Chan-wook is a director who makes incredibly complicated things look easy. His Oldboy was a relentless machine, all forward momentum and fury, and his first English-language film, Stoker , pursued its disturbed story to its logical ends, testing the audience’s mettle in the process. (I mean this as a compliment — if it works for you, Stoker really works.)

But The Handmaiden might be his best film yet. When watching it, pay attention to how frequently he keeps lots of actors in the same frame, then lets them react both to each other and to the story unfolding in front of them. This would seem to be a necessity in the tale of a complicated love triangle — we want to see Sookee react to the con man’s attempts to seduce Hideko — but you’d be surprised how many movies about similar stories forget that fact.

Park also approximates the headlong rush of falling in love with his skillful use of match cuts — an edit that cuts between two images, or two movements that seem to match each other in such a way that he can cut between settings and even time periods and suggest they’re all part of the same continuum.

In my favorite, Sookee and Hideko go from the closed-off confines of the mansion Hideko has lived in most of her life to the glorious outdoor sunshine in a quick cut between lateral movements. One step becomes a run.

Park’s films always boast great production design, and his work with Seong-hie Ryu and costume designer Sang-gyeong Jo creates a setting as vivid as you’re likely to see in a movie this year. I was particularly taken with how the house Hideko lives in is split equally between Japanese and English influences — a subtle nod toward the story’s origins in Waters’s novel.

But most of all, Park focuses at all times on the thrill of self-discovery, on the moment when you figure out that there’s more to yourself than you ever could have known. Sookee and Hideko weren't aware they could feel this level of ardor until they met each other, but the deeper they fall in love, the more Park’s filmmaking soars into the sky. It’s the kind of movie where the tiniest gesture or glance sets off not just fireworks but a full Fourth of July display.

The Handmaiden is in select theaters now. It will expand in the weeks to come.

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The Handmaiden Review

Park chan-wook adapts sarah waters' crime novel fingersmith..

Park Chan-wook organized his story in such a way that keeps audiences engaged with the film in its entirety, its Easter eggs an enjoyable challenge to partake in rather than a confusing twist brush-off.

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Movie Review – The Handmaiden (2016)

June 14, 2017 by Freda Cooper

The Handmaiden , 2016.

Directed by Park Chan-wook Starring Min-hee Kim, Tae-ri Kim, Jung-woo Ha, and Jin-woong Jo.

Japanese heiress Hideko employs a new handmaiden, Sook-hee, but what she doesn’t know is that the girl is a pickpocket.  She’s been recruited by a con artist who aims to marry her mistress and swindle her out of her fortune.  The plot seems to be going according to plan, until Hideko starts to fall for her maid.

For Victorian England, read Korea under Japanese occupation in the 1930s. Oldboy director Park Chan-wook has taken Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith and changed its location and timing, turning it into luxurious thriller with more twists and turns than the writhing octopus that one of the characters keeps crammed into an all-too-small tank.  The result is The Handmaiden , the director’s first Korean film after Stoker .

Sook-hee (Tae-ri Kim) comes from poverty, the daughter of a notorious pickpocket.  And she’s following in her mother’s footsteps until suave con-man Fujiwara (Jung-woo Ha) recruits her to help in his plan to marry for money.  Lots of it.  His prey is heiress Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim), who lives a reclusive life with her uncle, who has an all-consuming taste for pornography which he inflicts on his niece.  Sook-hee takes up her new duties, Fujiwara wheedles his way into the affections of her haughty mistress and all seems to be going according to plan.  But Hideko’s feelings for her maid intensify and all is not necessarily as it seems.

We’re seduced by the story within seconds and sink deeper into it as the first chapter of the film unfolds.  The grandiose style, breathtaking visuals and sets, stunning cinematography with its liking for wide-angle shots – they’re all designed to captivate.  And, as we’re introduced to the second part of the narrative, it’s apparent that the object of seduction isn’t just Lady Hideko.  It’s us as well, because now the story is turned on its head, demonstrating that appearances aren’t just deceptive, but duplicitous as well.  The irony is that, although we know that Fujiwara is a schemer and a crook, he’s way out of his league compared to Hideko.  For years, she’s been dominated by her perv of an uncle, whose tongue has turned black from licking the ink he uses in his paintings.  Given a taste of freedom, she demonstrates a determination and cunning that her so-called suitor simply can’t match.

Spine-tingling sensuality and intimacy – never has smoothing a rough tooth been so emotionally charged – live side by side with naked sexuality: two sides of the same coin.  And this contrast motif recurs regularly throughout the film, but in different and often surprising contexts.  Inside her uncle’s mansion, Hideko wears Western clothes and the house itself has an opulent British style: yet Sook-hee is clad traditional costume and the thousands of books filling up the uncle’s library are all in Japanese, with explicit Eastern illustrations.

The Handmaiden makes your head spin, with both its story and its images.  A giddy concoction of sex and thrills, luxury and duplicity, it is never less than entrancing.  And it’ll leave you gasping.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Freda Cooper –  Follow me on Twitter , check out my movie blog and listen to my podcast, Talking Pictures .

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Festival Reviews

Showcasing the best of movies, and film festivals from around the world., film review: the handmaiden (south korea 2016) ***.

Starring: Min-hee Kim, Jung-woo Ha, Jin-woong Jo

Review by Gilbert Seah

South Korean helmer Park Chan-wook, known for his excellent thriller OLDBOY returns with another suspense thriller, this time adapting Sarah Waters’ Victorian England-set bestseller Fingersmith to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. The adaptation works with a few flaws but the result is nevertheless something completely different – a historical drama that turns out to be both an erotically charged thriller and a lesbian romance, with sex scenes rivalling BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR. Park’s film is told in three chapter’s from the points of view of the story’s three characters. The film contains lots of flashbacks, with each flashback containing possibly a different meaning to the story than when the scene first appears. It is tight and clever editing, but too many of these lend to a bit of confusion. A few parts at the end are also confusing like the one in which Fujiwara rows a boat in a misty lake with the two women in it.

The three distinct perspectives are of: Japanese aristocrat Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), Korean thief Sookee (Kim Tae-ri), and pseudonymous schemer and thief, Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo). Hideko lives isolated in the luxurious colonial manor built by her tyrannical and depraved uncle (Cho Jin-woong), a book collector who forces Hideko to read erotic stories for his lecherous old friends. Into this bizarre yet static daily routine enters new handmaiden Sookee, who is in on the purported Count Fujiwara’s scheme to marry Hideko and seize her inheritance. But the twist in the plot does not end here. The Count is in reality scheming against Sookee with Hideko with even more plot twists (not revealed in the review) on the way. It all becomes clear in the very end though confusing when each twist is revealed and in flashbacks.

But for all that the film is worth, Western audiences will be treated with a sumptuous feast for the eyes, in terms of the Korean and Japanese period atmosphere, from the colourful costumes, to the sets and wardrobe to the strange practise of the rich and famous. The one scene in which the two women destroy the valuable scrolls and books is one that stands out the most.

Park’s fondness for the gruesome and excesses, as observed in his films OLDBOY and LADR VENGEANCE is on display here. The digit chopping with the page clamp cutter segment had one critic walk out of the press screening. The lesbian love-making scenes between Sookee and Hideko, with their bodies sliding along each other with extreme moaning will also have the audience drooling. Other excesses include foul language, surrealism (the misty boat ride on the lake; the lengthy tooth rubbing scene) and erotism (Hideko’s sex readings to her uncle and dirty cronies).

THE HANDMAIDEN has delighted many critics for these excesses. But excesses are excesses and the film which runs a full two and a half hours could do with a bit of trimming. The film nevertheless is a beautifully meticulously crafted period piece with enough plot twists to tease most audiences.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkvHtfRAKNk

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The Handmaiden Review

14 Apr 2017

145 minutes

The Handmaiden

The Handmaiden is numerous things at once. It’s a loose adaptation of British novelist Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith ; it’s a milestone of LGBT cinema in conservative South Korea; it’s an unapologetically kinky slice of erotica Tinto Brass at his most florid would be proud of; it’s a Byzantinely structured tale of con and counter-con that makes real demands of its audience to keep up; it’s a stirring narrative of women escaping from bastard men; it’s a vividly sketched chamber piece; and — most importantly — it’s a damn good yarn. After the trip to America that seems to be a rite of passage for Asian directors (Kim Jee-woon and The Last Stand , for example), Park Chan-wook has followed up Stoker with what might be his best film — and that’s not a claim you make lightly about the director of Oldboy .

Park Chan-wook has followed up Stoker with what might be his best film.

What sounds like a rote set-up — two people teaming up to con a rich person out of their money — is the launchpad for a dazzlingly complex psycho-sexual thriller where names and identities shift as often as outward allegiances. Suffice to say that not all is as it seems, with key scenes revisited time and again to radically alter our perception of what was originally going on. Park — always a watchmaker of a writer — has created an elaborate, teasing, unruly construction that ultimately deeply satisfies.

There have always been strains of perversion in Park’s work, and while his camera acrobatics have been toned down — perhaps due to the period setting — his flair for design and costume has gone into overdrive. The setting — largely a remote country house that combines Western and Korean architecture, in a likely nod to the origins of the material — is so exquisitely realised, it takes a while to clock how barmy its layout is. Plus, as usual with Park, watch out for the colour purple, which he uses to mark out important objects and rooms. There’s not a costume here that goes unfetishised (in particular the corsets worn by Kim Min-hee's Lady Hideko), and as the plot develops into more outlandish territory, the writer in play feels less Waters and more the Marquis de Sade.

Ah yes, the sex. In these situations there’s always the risk of 'male gaze' accusations, but unlike in, say, Blue Is The Warmest Colour , there is seldom the sense of it here. The three big sex scenes are key to both character and narrative, and manage that rare thing: every breath, every shudder, is telling you about the shifting relationships, rather than about the actor’s time in the gym. In fact, in a very Parkian touch, the sexiest scene is one of amateur dentistry. The line between titillation and sensuality is straddled but not crossed — despite close-ups of post-cunnilingus moistened lips and one shot that appears to be from a vagina’s POV. This is a film up-front and unembarrassed about its amatory elements, and it’s all the stronger for it.

It takes place in a porny world where apparently everybody is horny all the time; as the sexual near-hysteria ramps up, nobody gets home knackered after a long day and just wants a cup of tea. But perhaps Nigel Tufnel was right: what’s wrong with being sexy? There’s a long tradition of erotic cinema in Asia, of which The Handmaiden is very self-consciously an update, and with which it’s in explicit dialogue. Park is content to remain matter-of-fact and not bang a progressive gong, yet there is plenty of raw material for emancipatory readings here if you want it. But why reduce everything to a teachable moment, when there is so much purely aesthetic pleasure on offer?

Finally, though, for all the more baroque elements, there’s a generosity here that’s miles away from the cruelty of Park’s earlier work, and even the more villainous characters have their time to shine. Who’d have thought a film with this many scenes of torture, wooden sex dolls, blood on sheets and octopus porn would turn out ultimately to be so sweet?

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The handmaiden.

Directed by Park Chan-wook

Never did they expect to get into a controversial relationship...

In 1930s Korea, a swindler and a young woman pose as a Japanese count and a handmaiden to seduce a Japanese heiress and steal her fortune.

Kim Min-hee Kim Tae-ri Ha Jung-woo Cho Jin-woong Kim Hae-sook Moon So-ri Lee Yong-nyeo Kwak Eun-jin Lee Dong-hwi Jo Eun-hyung Rina Takagi Han Ha-na Lee Kyu-jung Kim See-eun Ha Si-yeon Eun-yeong Kim Jeong Ha-dam Yoo Min-chae Won Geun-hui Kim Jong-dae Jang Han-sun Kim Lee-woo Shinsuke Fujimoto Katsuhiro Nagano Lee Ji-ha Tomomitsu Adachi Takashi Kakizawa Seo-Yoon Hwang Shin-hye Park Show All… Lee Ji-hye So-Yeon Heo Lee Yoon-jae Choi Jong-ryul Kim Joon-woo Bae Il-hyuck Kim Soo-woong Yong-Hyun Jo Park Ki-ryung Choi Byung-mo Han Chang-hyun Kim In-woo Kwon Hyuk Hyung-tae Im Oh Man-seok Kim Byung Gi In-su Kim Alexander Scarborough Jin-Chul Kim Do-Hyung Kim Eun-ji Hong Song Da-eun Jeong In-kyeom Nam Gyeong-min Ahn Seong-bong Seon Uk-hyeon Lee In-chul

Director Director

Park Chan-wook

Producers Producers

Yoon Suk-chan Jeong Won-jo Jay Lee Kim Jong-dae Syd Lim

Writers Writers

Park Chan-wook Chung Seo-kyung

Original Writer Original Writer

Sarah Waters

Casting Casting

Kumiko Hosokawa

Editors Editors

Kim Sang-bum Kim Jae-beom

Cinematography Cinematography

Chung Chung-hoon

Assistant Directors Asst. Directors

Shinsuke Fujimoto Bae Seon-ok

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Miky Lee Park Chan-wook Jeong Tae-sung

Lighting Lighting

Chang-bae Kang Bae Il-hyuck

Camera Operator Camera Operator

Kim Yong-seong

Additional Photography Add. Photography

Production design production design.

Ryu Seong-hie

Art Direction Art Direction

Yoon Sung-hye

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Lee Eun-jin Kwon Soo-yeon Lee Gi-seok

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Lee Jeon-hyoung Cho Yong-seok Shon Byeong-su Jo Gyeong-hun

Stunts Stunts

Yoo Sang-seob Song Min-seok

Composer Composer

Cho Young-wuk

Sound Sound

Moon Chul-woo Fabrizio Cheloni Kim Suk-won Lee Jung-ho Kim Eun-jung Choi Eun-ah Tom Russbueldt Jung Gun

Costume Design Costume Design

Cho Sang-kyung

Makeup Makeup

Song Jong-hee Kim Ka-ryoon Kwak Tae-yong Lee Hee-eun

Moho Film Yong Film CJ Entertainment

South Korea

Primary language, spoken languages.

Japanese Korean

Releases by Date

14 may 2016, 25 may 2016, 18 jun 2016, 03 jul 2016, 08 jul 2016, 09 jul 2016, 15 jul 2016, 22 jul 2016, 05 aug 2016, 10 sep 2016, 22 sep 2016, 25 feb 2017, theatrical limited, 21 oct 2016, 01 jun 2016, 24 jun 2016, 30 jun 2016, 07 jul 2016, 19 aug 2016, 13 oct 2016, 02 nov 2016, 04 nov 2016, 10 nov 2016, 02 dec 2016, 05 jan 2017, 12 jan 2017, 27 jan 2017, 02 feb 2017, 17 feb 2017, 03 mar 2017, 30 mar 2017, 12 apr 2017, 14 apr 2017, 19 may 2017, 29 aug 2019, 27 jul 2016, 17 aug 2016, 13 may 2019, 18 may 2017, 02 jun 2017, 16 jun 2017, 26 jul 2018, releases by country.

• Premiere R 18+ Sydney Film Festival
• Premiere R 18+ Melbourne International Film Festival
• Theatrical 18
• Premiere Toronto International Film Festival
• Premiere Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
• Theatrical K-16
• Premiere Cannes Film Festival
• Theatrical 12
• Digital 12 Arte.tv
• Theatrical 16
• Theatrical Κ-18
• Theatrical III
• Premiere Jerusalem Film Festival
• Theatrical R18+

Netherlands

• Physical 16 DVD

New Zealand

• Premiere 16 New Zealand International Film Festival
• Premiere 16 New Horizons Film Festival
• Theatrical M/18 Apresentado no Cannes Film Festival
• Premiere Belgrade Film Festival
• Theatrical R21 4 min. removed
• Digital Extended Cut
• Physical DVD
• Physical Blu-ray
• Theatrical 16 ICAA 196416

Switzerland

• Premiere 16 Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival
• Theatrical R-18
• Premiere Fantastic Fest
• Theatrical limited R

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Review by kyle ★★★★★ 1

scamming men, falling in love, destroying property... i want what they have

Review by cinéfila... 🕯️ ★★★★½ 3

doctor: you have five minutes to live me, knowing full well that the library destruction scene lasts four minutes and forty seconds: great! that's more than enough time!!!!

Review by Karst ★★★★½ 1

2nd park chan-wook film ive seen where i spent the 1st act going “this is cool” the 2nd act going “what the absolute fuck is going on, this movie is horribly edited” and the 3rd act going “forget everything i just said, everything about this is perfect”

genuinely spent a solid 30 min in the middle of this telling myself i’d never watch this again and honestly, might rewatch in a few days idk why not

to the hundreds (literally) of people who’ve wanted me to watch this for years, i did it!

Review by oppie ★★★★★ 5

smut reading party in my local library @ 8pm tonight. pull up

Review by clementine ★★★★½ 5

omg those girls are totally bffs! i need to get a best friend like that

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'The Handmaiden' Was an Overlooked Masterpiece of Korean Cinema - Great, you liked 'Parasite'! Here's another twisted movie about class tension and revenge.

Review: ‘The Handmaiden’

TW: Mention of sexual abuse

Park Chan-Wook’s rework of Sarah Waters’s celebrated novel Fingersmith feels a lot like rope play: kinky, knotty and deliberately delayed gratification, rolling in at just under three hours long. In co-writers Chan-Wook and Seo-kyeong Jeong’s deft and cunning hands, Waters’s queer, corset-ripping period drama is relocated to Japanese-occupied ‘30s Korea, the class and gender tensions of the Victorian original filtered through a colonial lens. From across this divide, two female leads – played with deep respective finesse by Tae-ri Kim and Min-hee Kim – attempt to cross and double-cross each other, only to fall in lust along the way.

Tae-ri plays Sook-hee, a Korean pickpocket recruited by Jung-woo Ha’s caddish Korean conman. He promises Sook-hee, that together they’ll masquerade as a handmaiden, Tamako, and suitor, Japanese-born Count Fujiwara, in order to swindle a pale, neurotic and isolated Japanese heiress – Min-hee Kim’s haunting Lady Hideko – out of her fortune. The plan is to woo, elope with and promptly institutionalise Hideko, using Tamako as wing woman – though as we discover, there’s more to this gambit than Sook-hee realises.

To close in on his prey, Fujiwara must first ingratiate himself with Hideko’s abusive, perverted and equally duplicitous uncle, Jin-woong Jo’s Kouzuki. Like Fujiwara, Kouziki is also a duplicitious social climber: a Korean farmhand who has married his way into the gentry, where he now passing himself off as Japanese-born. And like Fujiwara, he also has designs on Hideko’s inheritance, In a house full of monsters – from the ‘pet’ in the basement to the Danvers-like housekeeper, Sasaki – this depraved patriarch is king, ruling over Hideko with a brutal, sinister hand. But unknown to him, there’s a rebellion fomenting: Hideko, we later discover, is not the naïve, defenceless aristocrat Tamako has fallen for, but rather a desperate and calculating survivor of abuse, nurturing her own secret passions and designs.

On its surface, The Handmaiden is an intoxicating study of duality and code-switching, a theatre played with the ropes that rig society to elevate the few and subjugate the many. It’s a meditation on power and desire, porn and performance. But more than this: its a brilliantly dark ode to women’s desire and autonomy: a subject that remains as pressing today as it was a century ago.

The film, like the novel, is told in three parts from three different vantage points, the same scenarios accumulating new meanings with each retelling. The repetition feels compulsive, fetishistic in the same way Kouzuki lusts for books and Tamako obsessives over feminine finery – fine jewels; laced lingerie; scented baths and the sweet-sour kisses of her mistress. Together, these individual fixations interconnect to form a subject Chan-Wook has returned to again and again, in the Vengeance Trilogy and 2013’s Stoker : the complicated matrix of family and home, with its closed network of roles and scripts and intergenerational dynamics.

Just like its inhabitants, Hideko’s home is a thing caught in flux, a thing that wants to bridge worlds – part English country pile, part Japanese mansion. Under Kouzuki’s stewardship, it’s a Japanese puzzle box, all hidden wings and spy holes, a space where – in true Chan-Wook style – the erotic and obscene converge. In less accomplished hands, The Handmaiden might have been turgid, ridiculous even. But Chan-Wook and Chung are artful puppet masters, turning the drama up to asphyxiating levels only to puncture its most pivotal moments – the sex scenes; a suicide attempt; covert liaisons – with disarming pinpricks of sweet, weird and devilish humour.

Witness the glorious contempt Hideko shows Fujiwara during the kimono-tying post-matrimony scene, preferring a knife handle to her new husband’s touch;  marvel at Tamako’s sword-wielding, snake-smashing Furie during the glorious destruction of Kouziki’s library of filth. When Fujiwara despairs at his female conspirator’s apparently incomprehensible emotions, the punch line isn’t women but men, and their cocksure myopia.

These are potent laughs, played for feminist kicks. In Hideko, the frigid, quasi-ghost girl of gothic 19 th century sensation novels is neither the mad women in the attic nor the asylum angel, but rather the frighteningly rational survivor in the basement, tricking her way to liberation one performance at a time. If Sook-hee is endearingly gauche as Tamako, Min-lee’s Hideko is a paragon of elegant guile, skillfully switching between pale ingénue, painted geisha and drag-sporting strategist. We marvel at her slyness, not as proof of female duplicity but of our hard-won multiplicity – an essential survival skill in a world that demands performance from us in every sphere.

Chan-Wook has been refreshingly frank regarding his feminist hopes for this girls-against-the-patriarchy opus, and his attempts at fostering a supportive environment for his female leads . But The Handmaiden ‘s sex scenes have divided critics since it toured the film festival circuit last year. Like The Duke of Burgundy and Blue Is The Warmest Colour before it this is, after all, another graphic lesbian love story mediated through a straight male director’s gaze. When asked if she thought the sex scenes reproduced tired, cishet fantasies of girl-on-girl action, Waters offered a considered counterpoint:

“Fingersmith was about finding space for women to be with each other away from prying eyes. Though ironically the film is a story told by a man, it’s still very faithful to the idea that the women are appropriating a very male pornographic tradition to find their own way of exploring their desires.”

For the most part I am inclined to agree. The love scenes feel intentionally staged, designed to turn us on only to trip us up with guffaws and moues minutes later, via histrionics (“I can die happy knowing I got to go down on you!”), uncomfortably extended facial close-ups (see the tribbing scene), and buzz-killing tongue-action. Chan-Wook will give us our kicks, but only ironically and reflexively: at one remove.

For the most part, this mischievous attempt at reconciling (male) voyeurism with feminist film-making is effective. The closing scene is the exception, unfolding without dialogue and comedy in a long, sustained and graphic shot that zooms in on the giggling lovers’ bodies before panning off to the night sky, where a bright full moon shines down on a silvery, gentle ocean – a beautiful, if clichéd, tapestry of feminine symbols. There’s a frustrating neatness to this scene’s unexpected sex act, a benevolent attempt to punctate Hideko’s story by transforming childhood trauma into adult pleasure. Are things ever that simple, or transformative? I’m not so sure.

The perfect symmetry of the lovers in congress during the final scene is also troubling, reaching for radical sameness but landing closer to mainstream porno homogeny. Again, Waters offers a thoughtful interpretation, via Chan-Wook:

“They are like mirrors of each other, which I’ve found rather troubling in the past because it blacks out the difference, but when I spoke to Park he said he was bringing the Japanese mistress and the Korean sewing girl together on an equal level. The novel is about class rather than gender: people passing themselves off as something they’re not. The film is more about colonialism: that very fraught relationship between Korea and Japan.”

It’s a reasonable but ultimately unconvincing rationale. In a film so rich with social tensions – from class and gender to sexuality and race – nothing here feels pure or without motive, including the sex. Chan-Wook attempts to reconcile this in the final scene, to vanish these anxieties with a stylised symmetry that, paradoxically, only betrays his own need for order, his own benevolent but naive vision of queer female love as some kind of classless utopia. The truth, as BDSM lesbian activists have told us for decades, is that our private roles are just as messy, complicated and imperfect as our public selves, and that there can be great joy and deep healing in queering those constructs: mistress and maid, top and bottom, switch and switch .

Happily, the unnatural quality of this scene only adds to the vaguely magical power of the lovers’ triumph, a happy-ending that’s all the more so given death’s constant proximity – from the vial of poison Hideko carries as protection against her uncle’s basement, to the eerie family heirloom she keeps lovingly stowed away in a hat box. Death may follow the couple – doesn’t it always, when queer women are on screen? – but only to unite them, unmasked under the cherry blossom tree during a dark night of the soul. It’s the men that death takes, in pleasingly brutal fashion. Hideko and Tamako survive, together – a just and sapid victory.

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The 25 best Korean horror movies of all time, ranked

Read on, if you dare.

Everett (2); Kuk Dong Seki Trading Co.

There's been a growing global appreciation for Korean pop culture lately, including Korean movies. In 2020, Parasite became the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, bringing a new awareness of Korean cinema to mainstream audiences around the world. But the country’s film history extends all the way back to the silent era, with multiple renaissances leading up to the Korean New Wave (also known as the New Korean Cinema) of the 1990s. 

South Korean movies are known for their boundary-pushing storytelling, genre-bending filmmaking, and beautifully convoluted twists — and that is certainly true of Korean horror. Some of the films on this list feature straightforward scares, while others, like Parasite director Bong Joon-ho ’s The Host , combine horror with sci-fi, comedy, and even melodrama. Korean horror films can also be quite violent, so take heed if you’re squeamish. For those who are up for an intense viewing experience, however, they’re some of the freshest and most memorable genre films being made anywhere in the world.

Here's Entertainment Weekly's ranking of the 25 best Korean horror movies of all time.

25. The Closet (2020)

Dark Sky Films

A slow-creeping horror-drama that prioritizes character over cheap jump scares, Kim Kwang-bin’s debut uses a classic trope — the monster in the closet — to explore sticky themes of child neglect and absent parenting. In an echo of Carol-Anne and the TV in Poltergeist (1982), young Yi-na (Heo Yool) is pulled into the spirit realm through her bedroom closet. Her widower father, Sang-won (Ha Jung-woo), is blamed for her disappearance and seeks the aid of an eccentric psychic (Kim Nam-gil) to find her. 

Where to watch The Closet : Tubi

24. Acacia (2003)

An understated creepy-kid movie with an occult twist, this horror film from director Park Ki-hyung — who also directed Whispering Corridors , which we’ll discuss later — plants folk horror in the suburbs. Six-year-old adoptee Jin-seung (Moon Woo-bin) is having trouble fitting in with his new parents (Shim Hye-jin and Kim Jin-geun) — a state of affairs that grows more distressing with the birth of a new baby. But the lonely little boy does have a strange bond with the acacia tree in his family’s backyard… 

Where to watch Acacia : Kanopy

23. The Mimic (2017)

Well Go USA Entertainment

Another Korean ghost story where those who are closest to us are also the ones we should fear, this film is based on the urban legend of the Jangsan beom . It’s a white, furry creature that supposedly lives in the mountains near Busan, looks like a cross between a sloth and a dog, and lures children out into the woods so it can eat them. It can also take on the form of departed loved ones, which is how a family recently relocated to the Jangsan countryside gets sucked into its supernatural world. 

Where to watch The Mimic : Tubi

22. The Red Shoes (2005)

Tartan Video

This hidden gem of 2000s Asian cinema is only loosely based on the 1845 fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen (for one thing, the shoes in this movie are pink). Instead, it uses Andersen’s premise as a launching pad for a horror story about sexism in Korean society. As the film begins, a mother (Kim Hye-soo) and her young daughter (Park Yeon-ah) have just moved into a new apartment after Mom caught Dad cheating. Then they find the titular shoes on a subway platform and discover that they have a seductive, evil power. Though the 1948 British drama of the same name may be the most famous iteration, this twisted modern take is palpably tense and absolutely worth your time.  

Where to watch The Red Shoes: Fandango at Home

21. #Alive (2020)

The timing of this Korean horror-thriller couldn’t have been better. Released on Netflix in September 2020, the film revolves around a reclusive gamer, Joon-woo (Yoo Ah-in), who locks himself up inside his apartment after realizing that a deadly virus is raging outside. Sound familiar? Of course, there’s one key difference: In the movie, the virus turns people into flesh-eating zombies. The addition of a resourceful neighbor, Yoo-bin (Park Shin-hye), takes the action to the streets, kicking up the excitement in the process. 

Where to watch #Alive : Netflix

20. Spider Forest (2004)

Fans of Christopher Nolan ’s Memento (2000) will find a lot to love in this edgy, cleverly constructed 2004 horror-mystery hybrid, which begins with reporter Kang Min (Kam Woo-sung) discovering his girlfriend close to death from multiple stab wounds and bleeding out next to a stranger’s corpse. If that’s not bad enough, Kang Min wakes up in the hospital where a detective informs him that he’s the main suspect in both murders. Although he barely remembers what happened, Kang Min must try to piece together what happened in order to clear his name. 

Where to watch Spider Forest: Kanopy

19. Seoul Station (2016)

An animated prequel to the zombie mega-hit Train to Busan released in the same year by the same director, Seoul Station matches its predecessor’s intensity while amping up the social commentary. The story takes place at the titular train station, where an injured elderly man shuffles across the platform as commuters look on with disgust. Then the man transforms into a violent, flesh-eating zombie, and all hell — with a side of George Romero -style class warfare — breaks loose. 

Where to watch Seoul Station : Amazon Prime Video

18. Hansel and Gretel (2007)

Another Korean movie based on European folklore, Hansel and Gretel draws its inspiration from the Brothers Grimm story of the same name. The film has the same grotesque nightmare quality as a fairytale — the old-fashioned ones, anyway — but changes up the story so that it’s an adult, Lee Eun-soo (Chun Jung-myung), who stumbles upon an idyllic cottage in the middle of the woods. There, he finds three children who appear to be held captive by their parents. But nothing is as it seems in this beautiful, grisly horror-fantasy.

Where to watch Hansel and Gretel : Tubi

17. Bedevilled (2010)

You may be tempted to turn off Bedevilled by the halfway mark, given the heaps of abuse — physical, emotional, and sexual — one of its female leads endures. But if you stick it out through the end, that horror gives way to violent, bloody catharsis as Bok-nam (Seo Young-hee) turns the tables on her cruel family and piggish husband. She does so with the help of her childhood friend Hae-won (Ji Sung-won), a businesswoman from the big city who managed to escape a life like Bok-nam’s on the remote island where they grew up. 

Where to watch Bedevilled : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

16. The Call (2020)

Combining crime and supernatural elements, this critically acclaimed film traverses many decades for an unusual time-travel twist on serial-killer thrillers. Park Shin-hye stars as Kim Seo-yeon, a woman who recently returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing mother. There, she discovers that the landline connects her to Oh Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo), who lived in the same house 20 years earlier. The two form a bond across time — until Seo-yeon starts to realize the dark, causal implications of their seemingly friendly phone calls.

Where to watch The Call : Netflix

15. The Medium (2021)

Unusually well-shot for a found footage horror movie, this Korean-Thai co-production presents itself as a mockumentary about a Northern Thai woman who claims to be possessed by a goddess. Nim (Sawanee Utoomma) says that her ancestral gift gives her the power to heal both physical and spiritual maladies. But the way her niece, who’s due to be initiated into the family legacy, is acting makes it seem more like a curse. It’s a slow build that becomes increasingly more violent with each excruciating moment, but the finale will leave your jaw on the floor. 

Where to watch The Medium : AMC+

14. The Quiet Family (1998)

Myung Films

A black comedy so dark that it becomes a horror movie, this film was a hit in South Korea and inspired redos from both Japan ( Takashi Miike ’s The Happiness of the Katakuris ) and India, where it was remade in three different languages. The premise has the potential for slapstick sillness, as an incompetent Seoul family fumbles its way through opening a hunting lodge in the Korean countryside. Then all their guests start dying by suicide, one after the other…

Where to watch The Quiet Family : Freevee

13. Monstrum (2018)

Set in the 16th century and supposedly based on true events, this monster movie plays with the audience’s expectations by remaining coy about whether its monster is actually real or the byproduct of Joseon dynasty palace intrigue. Spoiler alert: The monster is definitely real, a lion-bear hybrid covered in disgusting bloody pustules. Throw in period romance, a pair of wisecracking soldiers, and the occasional fart joke, and you’ve got a rip-roaring creature feature whose entertainment factor is off the charts. 

Where to watch Monstrum : AMC+

12. Whispering Corridors (1998)

Lotte Entertainment

Park Ki-hyung’s eerie ghost story uses an all-girls boarding school as a launching pad for supernatural horror. Touching on sensitive subjects like bullying and suicide, Whispering Corridors struck such a chord with Korean youth that it launched a franchise that continued into the 2020s. We also highly recommend the 1999 sequel Memento Mori, both for its heart-stopping scare scenes and then-taboo lesbian theme. 

Where to watch Whispering Corridors : Kanopy

11. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)

Set inside a former psychiatric hospital known as “ one of the most haunted places in South Korea ,” this found-footage horror movie starts off light then turns terrifying as six YouTubers filming in the building for laughs realize that the legends about Gonjiam are actually true. Director Jum Bung-shik makes clever use of the spooky location and visual format, leading to several moments of heart-stopping terror. Shortly after the release of this movie, the real Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital was torn down. Coincidence? You decide. 

Where to watch Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum : Peacock

10. Sleep (2023)

The only film on this list that has yet to be released in the United States, Jason Yu’s feature debut was a hit in South Korea in the fall of 2023. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that summer, where it got rave reviews from critics hailing this story of a woman whose insomnia tests her marriage — and her sanity. Much of the film rests on a razor’s edge between funny and frightening, which makes its twists and turns all the more surprising. Add a bravura finale, and you’ve got an instant Korean horror classic. 

Where to watch Sleep : Not available to stream

9. Three… Extremes (2004)

Only one of the segments in this horror anthology comes from a Korean director. (The other two filmmakers, Fruit Chan and Takashi Miike, are from Hong Kong and Japan, respectively.) But the Korean segment, Cut , is elegant and cruel in a way that only the great Park Chan-wook can pull off. The story revolves around a famous film director and his pianist wife, who are held hostage by a resentful background actor. But the real draw here is Cut ’s elaborate torture device, which uses piano wire in inventive and shocking ways. 

Where to watch Three… Extremes : Peacock

8. Save the Green Planet! (2003)

CJ Entertainment

Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet was recently optioned for a remake by Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone . And if you’ve seen the movie, that tracks. This bizarre and, at times, quite disturbing horror/sci-fi/comedy hybrid is strange and singular in a way that’s similar to Lanthimos’ work, telling the story of a conspiracy theorist who’s convinced that the CEO tied up in his basement is an alien intent on destroying the Earth. But is he really? 

Where to watch Save The Green Planet : Kanopy

7. Thirst (2009)

Aside from Cut, Thirst is the only true horror movie in Park Chan-wook’s filmography. And it’s got all of the sumptuous style you’d expect from the director of The Handmaiden (2016) . Song Kang-ho stars as Sang-hyun, a Catholic priest who contracts a virus while on a mission trip that makes him super-strong and inhumanly agile — and gives him a burning appetite for human blood. Things get complicated (and very bloody) when Sang-hyun begins a torrid affair with housewife Tae-Ju (Kim Ok-bin), leading to the kind of hysterical climax Korean genre movies do so well. 

Where to watch Thirst : Amazon Prime Video (to rent)

6. The Wailing (2016)

Some movies just have a malevolent aura about them, and The Wailing is one of them. While watching the residents of a small Korean village succumb, one by one, to the belief that they’ve been possessed by demons, you start to wonder if curses can be transmitted through screens as well. The film is long but worth the runtime, as we get to know the community members before witnessing the horror of what happens to them. It all builds to an exorcism scene that’s impressively staged and terrifyingly intense. 

Where to watch The Wailing : Netflix

5. The Host (2006)

Another quintessentially Korean genre-bender, Bong Joon-ho’s international breakout was a festival sensation when it premiered at Cannes in 2006. First and foremost, it’s a monster movie about a mutated creature that crawls out of the Han River causing mayhem and spreading a deadly virus. But it’s also a political satire and a family drama, driven by Song Kang-ho’s performance as a poor vendor who must descend into the sewers to battle the beast and save his daughter Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung).

Where to watch The Host : Hulu

4. I Saw the Devil (2010)

Even compared to the rest of the films on this list, Kim Jee-woon’ s crime/horror hybrid is an intense viewing experience that blurs the lines between good and evil in ultra-violent, darkly funny style. The stakes just keep getting higher in this Grand Guignol of bloodthirsty excess, as bereaved government agent Soo-hyun ( Lee Byung-hun ) descends into shocking depravity in his pursuit of serial killer Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik). The twist? Soo-hyun already caught him once; this second hunt is just for fun. 

Where to watch I Saw the Devil : Hulu

3. The Housemaid (1960)

Kuk Dong Seki Trading Co.

Although not strictly a horror movie — its tone is more comparable to an erotic thriller like Fatal Attraction — this 1960 feature is a milestone of genre cinema and Korean movies as a whole. Directed by Kim Ki-young, the film is a cautionary tale about the dangers of infidelity, following a couple that hires a maid to help around the house while the wife is pregnant, only to have the girl (Lee Eun-shim) destroy the family from the inside out. It’s since been remade multiple times, but the original’s gliding camerawork and social commentary make it a timeless classic. 

Where to watch The Housemaid : The Criterion Channel

2. Train to Busan (2016)

The biggest and most influential horror hit to come out of Korea in the past decade, this zombie thriller has inspired multiple spinoffs — including our No. 19 pick, the animated prequel Seoul Station. The secret to its success lies in its thrilling, claustrophobic action sequences: The story takes place almost entirely on a high-speed train from Seoul to Busan, where distant dad Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) is attempting to bond with his daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an). But they soon realize that all of Korea, not just their transit, has been taken over by hungry, impossibly fast zombies. 

Where to watch Train to Busan : Peacock

1. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

When it comes to the sophisticated style and shocking twists of Korean horror, no film is as perfect an example as A Tale of Two Sisters . Directed by Kim Jee-woon — who also made our No. 4 pick, I Saw the Devil — this psychologically harrowing film is about a pair of young girls who live in a handsome country home with their father. Also present are two malevolent presences: The ghost of their mother and their evil stepmother Eun-joo (Yum Jung-ah). Kim’s direction is bold and stylish, and the supernatural scenes are terrifying, embodying the finest that Korean horror has to offer. 

Where to watch A Tale of Two Sisters : Kanopy

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Production is through Imaginus, Showrunners, Studio AA and Action School.

The show will play on Disney+ in international markets and on Hulu in the U.S.

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More From Forbes

Korean shows on paramount+: ‘pyramid game,’ ‘voice,’ ‘signal’ and more.

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Ryu Da In as Myeong Ja-eun in Pyramid Game. Photo Credit: Shin Su Hye, Kim Hyun Joo/Paramount+.

If you’re a fan of Korean TV shows and wondering where to get your next K-drama fix, consider checking out the selection on Paramount+. The streamer has a small but eclectic library of Korean originals and licensed content that are some of the most boundary-pushing Korean shows ever made. From the unhinged survival series Bargain to the recently released psychological thriller Pyramid Game , here’s a look at the underrated yet absolutely bingeworthy K-dramas on Paramount+.

Pyramid Game

Based on the eponymous webtoon by Dalgonyak, Pyramid Game is a captivating teen thriller that’s probably closer to Squid Game or Alice in Borderland than anything from The CW’s golden era. Sharp and cool-headed Seong Su-ji (Kim Ji-yeon, aka Bona, of Twenty Five Twenty One ) transfers to an all-girls high school, where every month her class participates in a bizarre popularity contest called the Pyramid Game. Those who receive no votes from their classmates are subjected to extreme harassment and bullying—and Su-ji becomes the game’s next target. When Su-ji realizes that she and some of her classmates are in constant danger of falling victim to the game’s sadistic rules, she vows to end the Pyramid Game once and for all.

The cleverly scripted psychological drama starts to shine in its third episode, when Su-ji and the show’s main antagonist begin engaging in a battle of wits that makes them seem more like political masterminds than average high school students.

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Fun facts: Shin Seul-ki, who plays the class president Seo Do-ah, first rose to fame after appearing in the Netflix K-reality show Single’s Inferno .

Jang Da-ah, who plays Baek Ha-rin, is the older sister of Jang Won-young of the popular K-pop group IVE.

What happens after we die? Does heaven exist? And if humankind could create our own heaven, what might that look like? Would we be able to find eternal happiness there? These are just a few of the profound questions explored by Yonder , a thought-provoking sci-fi drama that was the first Korean series to be produced as part of Paramount’s partnership with Korean entertainment conglomerate CJ ENM.

After his wife passes away, Jae-hyun receives a message from her inviting him to a mysterious place called “Yonder,” an artificial world constructed from her memories. Jae-hyun decides to join her there, but he soon discovers some unsettling truths behind the man-made paradise.

Slow-paced and subtle, Yonder stars legendary actors Shin Ha-kyun ( Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance , Extreme Job ), Han Ji-min ( Our Blues ), Lee Jung-eun ( Parasite ) and Jung Jin-young ( Ode to My Father , Queen of Tears ) and was the most watched international series on Paramount+ in the US upon its release.

Fun fact: Yonder is the first series directed by Lee Joon-ik, who is known for directing K-cinema classics like The King and the Clown , Sunny and The Throne . Lee is among many respected Korean filmmakers who have ventured into making TV shows in recent years thanks to the rise of streaming.

Things are never quite what they seem in this gritty six-part thriller that’s, well, absolutely nuts. Hyung-soo (played by veteran actor Jin Seon-kyu) meets Ju-young (Jeon Jong-seo of Burning fame) in a secluded motel, believing he’s there to pay Ju-young for her sexual services. Turns out though that he’s unwittingly walked into an organ harvesting ring, and he soon finds himself gagged and bound to a gurney as Ju-young begins auctioning off his organs to random strangers who’ve assembled in the room. Just when it seems like the show can’t get any crazier, a massive earthquake strikes and destroys much of the building, leaving the survivors in a desperate race to stay alive.

Aside from its batty storyline, the show stands out for its unconventional approach to filming: each episode was shot in one continuous take, which served to heighten the series’ chaotic and tense atmosphere. Winner of the 2023 Canneseries award for Best Screenplay, Bargain earned rave reviews from critics in the US and Europe, though many viewers in Korea complained about the copious amounts of cursing.

Fun fact: Bargain is based on the 2015 short film of the same name by Lee Chung-hyeon, who is currently in a relationship with Jeon Jong-seo, who plays Ju-young in the series. Lee met Jeon on the set of his K-horror flick The Call and later directed her in the Netflix revenge thriller Ballerina .

In this highly acclaimed time-slip crime thriller, police officer Hae-young (Lee Je-hoon of the hit K-drama Taxi Driver ) and Detective Soo-hyun (Kim Hye-soo of Under the Queen’s Umbrella and Juvenile Justice ) solve cold cases with the help of a mysterious walkie-talkie that lets them communicate with Detective Jae-han (Cho Jin-woong of The Handmaiden ) from the past. Inspired by real crimes that happened in Korea, Signal won multiple accolades, including Best Drama at the 2016 Baeksang Arts Awards (roughly the Korean equivalent of the Golden Globes). Season two of the show is currently in development—about eight years after the release of its first season.

Fun fact: Signal , which was written by Kim Eun-hee (who later penned Revenant and Netflix’s first globally successful K-drama Kingdom ), was originally meant to be aired by top Korean broadcaster SBS. However, SBS eventually dropped the series, partly because a couple of Kim’s previous shows had underperformed on the network. Cable TV channel tvN picked it up, and Signal would go on to become one of the most successful K-dramas of its time. You can bet those execs over at SBS were kicking themselves afterward.

Religious cults are a hot-button issue in Korea and have sparked a number of documentaries and scripted content, but no other K-drama takes such an in-depth look at the phenomenon as Save Me does. Produced by Lee Jae-moon, who also worked on Signal , the disturbing mystery-thriller examines the enormous influence pseudo-religious groups sometimes wield in Korean society and how ordinary, rational human beings can easily be sucked into them.

The series’ first season is adapted from the webtoon Out of the World by Jo Geum-san, while the second season is based on the animated film The Fake by Yeon Sang-ho, best known for directing Train to Busan , Hellbound and Parasyte: The Grey . Both seasons are available on Paramount+.

Fun fact: Though both seasons of Save Me were released prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the show experienced a revival in Korea during the pandemic as many viewers drew comparisons between the first season and the real-life Shincheonji cult, which was largely blamed for initially spreading the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea.

One of a handful of uber-violent K-dramas before streamers like Netflix gave rise to more K-dramas with graphic content , Voice follows whip-smart policewoman Kang Kwon-joo (Lee Ha-na) as she uses her acute sense of hearing to save people from falling victim to grisly crimes. Each season she’s joined by a male detective who’s played by a Hallyu superstar (Jang Hyuk in season one, Lee Jin-wook for seasons two and three and Song Seung-heon in season four), and together they solve cases while tracking down serial killers.

Despite its depictions of extreme violence, Voice was so popular in South Korea that it was renewed for four seasons (an extremely rare feat at the time), the first two of which are available on Paramount+. It also inspired Japanese and Thai remakes.

Fun fact: Voice incited a ton of controversy and viewer complaints in South Korea for displaying excessive violence—so much so that the production team was slapped with a warning from the Korea Communications Standards Commission during the show’s first season and was forced to raise its age rating from 15 years and up to 19 years and up. However, despite continuing to show graphic content, the series went back to a 15+ rating for its second and third season, while only the first episode of season four was labeled with a 19+ rating.

A Bloody Lucky Day

When one customer after another hails his cab, taxi driver Oh Taek (Lee Sung-min of Misaeng: Incomplete Life and 12.12: The Day ) thinks he’s having the luckiest day of his life. He wonders if dreaming about pigs the previous night has anything to do with his unusual luck (according to Korean superstition, seeing pigs in a dream is supposed to bring good fortune). Then a mysterious passenger who introduces himself as Geum Hyeok-soo offers him a hefty sum for a long-distance ride, leading Taek to believe that his dream truly was on point.

However, what started out as a seemingly auspicious day quickly turns into the worst night of his life, as Taek learns that Hyeok-soo is actually a psychopathic serial killer on the run. As Hyeok-soo slays victims one by one along the highway, Taek must do everything he can to stay alive.

While the premise might call to mind Collateral , the gripping 10-episode series relies more heavily on complex character development, emotional storytelling and graphic violence to draw audiences in.

For more details on “A Bloody Lucky Day,” check out my in-depth review .

Fun facts: The Korean title of the show, “운수 오진 날,” literally means “The Day of Misdiagnosed Luck,” alluding to Taek’s dream.

Actor Yoo Yeon-seok, who plays Geum Hyeok-soo, stated in interviews that he thought a lot about how to portray Hyeok-soo’s character, who is shown as having permed hair and a frog-like face in the original webtoon. Since Yoo obviously couldn’t change his facial structure, he opted to sport a curly wig and freckles instead.

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