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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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‘The Handmaiden’ review: A lavish, erotic thriller like you’ve never seen

Movie review: Park Chan-wook’s period drama will keep you enthralled and guessing. Rating: 3-and-a-half stars out of 4.

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You have, I promise, never seen a movie quite like Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden.” It’s a period drama gone mad; a lavishly colorful, beautifully-filmed-erotic-revenge-crime thriller set in 1930s Korea. Based on a contemporary novel set in Victorian England (Sarah Waters’ “Fingersmith”), it features a forbidden lesbian love affair, a villain whose tongue has turned black (from ink on a fountain pen), a housekeeper who seems straight out of Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” some “50 Shades”-worthy whipping, elaborately laced corsets, an octopus and a plot that whips you around like a roller coaster in the dark. Just when you think you have your bearings, whoosh — around another corner you go.

And yet, as Park told an audience at the Toronto International Film Festival (where I saw “The Handmaiden” last month), “It’s probably the warmest of my films, with the happiest ending.” Park’s works — most notably his acclaimed trilogy consisting of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance” — are known for dark humor and brutal violence, and while there’s some bloodshed in “The Handmaiden” (notably, some bad things happening to unfortunate fingers), it’s restrained, by his standards.

Its story, at first, seems straightforward. A young Korean pickpocket named Sookee (newcomer Kim Tae-ri) plots with a con man (Ha Jung-woo) to pose as a maid for a wealthy Japanese woman, Hideko (Kim Min-hee), as a scheme to swindle her out of her inheritance. (The action takes place in Korea during the Japanese occupation of that country; both languages are used in the film, cleverly depicted in different-colored English subtitles.) Sookee soon finds herself both troubled by the strange surroundings of Hideko’s dark mansion (looking at a tree, she’s told, “My aunt’s ghost dangled from that branch”) and attracted to her lovely employer. And …

Movie Review ★★★½  

‘The Handmaiden,’ with Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook, Moon So-ri. Directed by Park Chan-wook, from a screenplay by Park and Chung Seo-kyung, inspired by the novel “Fingersmith” by Sarah Waters. 144 minutes. In Korean and Japanese, with English subtitles. Not rated; for mature audiences (contains nudity, sexuality and violence). Several theaters..

If you’ve read “Fingersmith,” you have a sense (though not entirely) of the ride you’re embarking on; if not, I’m not about to spoil it. Let me just say that there are moments in this film as visually beautiful as any this year (the cherry blossoms outside the house seem to float like snow) and that, over its nearly two-and-a-half hours, you will never be bored. As with encounters with pickpockets, watch carefully — you don’t want to miss a thing.

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Goings on About Town

The handmaiden.

The characters in Park Chan-wook’s film guard their lusts like hidden fires.

Illustration by Michael Cho

Park Chan-wook’s new film is his most delectable to date. Illicitly suave, it takes pleasure, over nearly two and a half hours, in fooling with the intricate plans of the characters and, for good measure, with the minds of the audience. The action is set in the nineteen-thirties, in Korea, and liberally adapted from Sarah Waters’s novel “Fingersmith,” a no less tasty tale of Victorian London. Kim Tae-ri plays Sook-Hee, a young woman bred in the low niceties of crime, who becomes a maidservant to the high-ranking Hideko (Kim Min-hee), herself no stranger to stratagems. It’s hard to find a single person onscreen whose title or demeanor is a reliable match for his or her true nature; for instance, neither the youthful count who arrives to pay court to Hideko nor her bibliomaniacal guardian is to be trusted an inch. Just to ensnare us more tightly, Park replays some of the episodes with a twist, from a different viewpoint, yet the marvel of the movie is that, far from seeming like mere trickery, it feels drenched in longing and desire. The cinematographer, gravely surveying these shenanigans, is Chung Chung-Hoon. In Korean and Japanese.

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The Handmaiden review – a ripe, erotic tale

Park Chan-wook refashions Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith into a perverse psychodrama that wrongfoots you at every turn

T here are giddy pleasures to be found in this rip-roaringly ripe erotic thriller/melodrama from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook. Inspired by Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith , The Handmaiden is a playfully provocative tale of seduction, desire and deceit. Slyly undermining stereotypes of fall guys and femmes fatales (this is more Bound than Basic Instinct ), Park’s film takes great delight in wrong-footing its audience, peeling away layers of mesmerising misdirection with delicious cinematic sleight of hand. As the serpentine narrative spirals back and forth upon itself, we witness the same events from multiple perspectives, each one more revealing than the last.

In Waters’s novel ( adapted as a BBC mini-series in 2005 ), an accomplished pickpocket is plucked from a Dickensian den to work in an upmarket home where she plays a key role in a scheme to separate a young heiress from her fortune. Park transfers the story from Victorian England to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule. Here, Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) is enlisted by elegant conman “Count” Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) to serve at the home of Japanese heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee).

Variously named “Tamako” and “Okju”, the mercurial Sook-hee must ensure that the naive Hideko falls in love with Fujiwara, enabling him to elope with her before swiftly committing the poor innocent to an asylum. His partner in crime will share the spoils, robbing Hideko’s Uncle Kouzuki of the handsome fortune he planned to inherit. Yet few of these characters are entirely what they seem, with role-playing, recitation, and unexpected reversals lurking at every corner, leaving us wondering just who exactly is “naive, and a bit foolish”.

The house in which this labyrinthine psychodrama plays out is a strange and mysterious hybrid, part western gothic mansion (there are shades of both The Haunting and Rebecca in its shadowy facade), part palatial Japanese residence. Within its lavishly sinister corridors we find rooms within rooms, spaces between the public and the private, the liminal and the subliminal. In one corridor, a symbolic snake stands guard, pointedly marking “the bounds of knowledge”. Down in the basement, something tentacular writhes, pulsating to the perverse rhythms of a library of Sadean pornographic writings. Meanwhile, out in the rolling grounds, the spectre of a dead aunt haunts the branches of the cherry trees, causing one inhabitant to wonder: “Did the big house make her go mad?”

After the Hitchcockian twists and skin-prickling Freudian symbolism of his first English-language feature Stoker , Park returns to the grand theatricality of his “Vengeance Trilogy” ( Sympathy for Mr Vengeance , Oldboy , Lady Vengeance ) with this fugue-like romp, which is by turns bitingly wry and pleasingly ribald. There’s a tactile fetishism to the ornate set designs, rich furnishings and lavish costumes (“all these buttons for my amusement”), while a profusion of shoes clutter the living space of a lady who, ironically, has nowhere to go.

Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon’s widescreen frame makes the most of this artefact-laden visual feast, while Cho Young-wuk’s score swoops and surges its way around the action, amplifying Park’s maximalist aesthetic.

While Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour was criticised by source author Julie Maroh for its porn-inflected “display of so-called lesbian sex”, The Handmaiden has been enthusiastically embraced by Sarah Waters as a valid interpretation of the subversive sexuality of her novel. In a recent Guardian interview she praised Park’s film for remaining “very faithful to the idea that the women are appropriating a very male pornographic tradition to find their own way of exploring their desires” while simultaneously deconstructing those traditions. In one arrestingly weird scene, a theatrical reading from a work of allegedly erotic literature is illustrated with the aid of a giant marionette, providing an absurdist tableau which leaves its ridiculous male spectators frantically fanning their red faces and squirming awkwardly in their seats.

“Tell me, what is it that men want, at night?” Hideko asks innocently, a question to which The Handmaiden offers a piercingly satirical response. Just as the narrative plays with ideas of national colonialism, so the film’s female protagonists strive to find a space of their own, beyond the boundaries of stories told by men.

As for Park, he clearly relishes the opportunity to tie his audience up in knots, engaging them in a carefully choreographed game of cat-and-mouse, which his well-chosen cast play to a T. Despite the daunting running time, the film flies by in a breathless whirl of cinematic exuberance.

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Cannes Film Review: ‘The Handmaiden’

Park Chan-wook's Korean interpretation of Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith" is clever, heady and sensually lavish to a fault.

By Maggie Lee

Chief Asia Film Critic

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Boasting more tangled plots and bodies than an octopus has tentacles, South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook ‘s “ The Handmaiden ” is a bodice-ripper about a pickpocket who poses as a maid to swindle a sequestered heiress. His first Korean-language fiction feature since 2009’s “Thirst,” it’s sybaritic, cruel and luridly mesmerizing.

Freely transposing Welsh novelist Sarah Waters’ Victorian-set romantic thriller “Fingersmith” to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonialism, Park initially takes the tale of calculation, seduction and betrayal to heady narrative heights. Before long, however, the director of such extreme revenge thrillers as “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” and “Oldboy” slides back into his own febrile cinematic universe of eroticized torture and misogyny, rather submerging Waters’ theme of female rebellion and liberation. Not that this should impair the film’s marketing potential in any way: Commercial and arthouse audiences alike will either thrill to its stylized potboiler elements or swoon over the opiate influence of Park’s signature aesthetic beauty.

Park’s adaptation, co-written with Chung Seo-kyung, retains the novel’s triptych structure. Book One, the most faithful to the original, is narrated by Nam Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), an orphaned girl raised as a pickpocket by human trafficker Boksun. A Korean gold-digger ( Ha Jung-woo ), posing as Japanese count Fujiwara, plucks her from the slums to aid him in the seduction of Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a Japanese heiress living under the stewardship of her Korean uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong). Fujiwara’s plan is to elope with Hideko, marry her, then commit her to a mental asylum so he can pocket her inheritance.

As the common Sook-hee is ushered into this magnificent colonial estate, her bewildered exploration of the Gothic mise-en-scène echoes the mysterious atmospherics of Guillermo del Toro’s “Crimson Peak.” Hideko’s languorous, marble-surfaced beauty quickly dissolves under the new maid’s wide-eyed cheerfulness, and a bathing scene brims with furtive eroticism fueled by an aching tooth and a lollipop.

Park elegantly plays their innocent dressing-up and role-switching rituals against the real, pernicious deceit of Fujiwara, as newcomer Kim Tae-ri makes her gradual change of heart passionately palpable. The only defect, one that sometimes risks taking viewers out of the story, is the ensemble’s evident struggle to deliver sophisticated old-world Japanese dialogue, which somewhat hampers their spontaneity of expression.

Book Two tells the same story from Hideko’s vantage point, involving a major twist that viewers unfamiliar with the novel would be hard pressed to see coming. It’s also where the screenplay veers notably from the source, virtually writing out Boksun’s role and the secrets of the women’s birth.

What it instead chooses to highlight and expand is the young lady’s traumatic childhood upbringing by her uncle and aunt (Moon So-ri, cast strikingly against type). Inside the mansion’s voluminous library, Kouzuki’s bibliophilia is revealed to have decidedly aberrant tendencies. Dabbling in the sadomasochism of Takashi Ishii’s “Flower and Snake” series with a touch of Teruo Ishii’s grotesque “porno jidaigeki” — 1970s sexploitation costume dramas — these scenes offer their share of prurient pleasure, yet moves the narrative further away from delicate affairs of the heart.

The third and final book, which shifts focus to Fujiwara’s plight, is giddy with more revelations and reversals. It is also has Park’s signature pain fetish gratuitously splashed over it: One scene adds a new, bloody layer of meaning to the novel’s title “Fingersmith,” while another even brings back a certain signature mollusc from “Oldboy” in monstrously depraved fashion. And while there’s no denying the denouement’s cleverness or the finale’s breathtaking, lyrical evocation of sapphic desire, one comes out feeling sensually satiated.

Production values are sensational even by Korean cinema’s blue-chip standards. The mansion’s interior, designed by Ryu Seong-hee, is decorated in hybrid British-Japanese style, combinng the former’s decorative luxuriance with the latter’s elegant symmetry. In his last film, the U.S.-set “Stoker,” Park became so carried away with the set of the retro American country house that he made it the centerpiece of a flimsily constructed family mystery. Here, he is in danger again of lingering on too much visual paraphernalia — even if that matches Waters’ equally dense textual details — but involving characters and a more substantially crafted plot maintain its artistic balance.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 14, 2016. Running time: 144 MIN. Original Title: "Agassi"

• Production: (South Korea) A The Joker, BAC Films, CJ Entertainment presentation of a Moho Film, Yong Film production. (International sales: CJ Entertainment , Seoul.) Produced by Park Chan-wook, Syd Lim. Executive producers, Miky Lee. Co-producers, Yoon Suk-chan, Kim Jong-dae, Jeong Won-jo. Co-executive producer, Jeong Tae-sung.
• Crew: Directed by Park Chan-wook. Screenplay, Chung Seo-kyung, Park, adapted from the novel "Fingersmith" by Sarah Waters. Camera (color, widescreen, HD), Chung Chung-hoon; editor, Kim Sang-bum, Kim Jae-bum; music, Cho Young-wuk; production designer, Ryu Seong-hee; costume designer, Cho Sang-kyung; sound (5.1 Ch.), Kim Suk-won; re-recording mixer, Jung Gun; visual effects supervisor, Lee Jeon-hyoung; visual effects, 4th Creative Party; associate producer, Jay Lee.
• With: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook, Moon So-ri.   (Korean, Japanese dialogue)

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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.

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February 9, 1986 Book Review By MARY McCARTHY THE HANDMAID'S TALE By Margaret Atwood. urely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition. Surprised recognition, even, enough to administer a shock. We are warned, by seeing our present selves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue. That was the effect of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' with its scary dating, not 40 years ahead, maybe also of ''Brave New World'' and, to some extent, of ''A Clockwork Orange.'' It is an effect, for me, almost strikingly missing from Margaret Atwood's very readable book ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' offered by the publisher as a ''forecast'' of what we may have in store for us in the quite near future. A standoff will have been achieved vis-a-vis the Russians, and our own country will be ruled by right-wingers and religious fundamentalists, with males restored to the traditional role of warriors and us females to our ''place'' - which, however, will have undergone subdivision into separate sectors, of wives, breeders, servants and so forth, each clothed in the appropriate uniform. A fresh postfeminist approach to future shock, you might say. Yet the book just does not tell me what there is in our present mores that I ought to watch out for unless I want the United States of America to become a slave state something like the Republic of Gilead whose outlines are here sketched out. Another reader, less peculiar than myself, might confess to a touch of apathy regarding credit cards (instruments of social control), but I have always been firmly against them and will go to almost any length to avoid using one. Yet I can admit to a general failure to extrapolate sufficiently from the 1986 scene. Still, even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues. I just can't see the intolerance of the far right, presently directed not only at abortion clinics and homosexuals but also at high school libraries and small-town schoolteachers, as leading to a super-biblical puritanism by which procreation will be insisted on and reading of any kind banned. Nor, on the other hand, do I fear our ''excesses'' of tolerance as pointing in the same direction. Liberality toward pornography in the courts, the media, on the newstands may make an anxious parent feel disgusted with liberalism, but can it really move a nation to install a theocracy strictly based on the Book of Genesis? Where are the signs of it? A backlash is only a backlash, that is, a reaction. Fear of a backlash, in politics, ought not to deter anybody from adhering to principle; that would be only another form of cowardice. The same for ''excessive'' feminism, which here seems to bear some responsibility for Gilead, to be one of its causes. The kind of doctrinaire feminism likely to produce a backlash is exemplified in the narrator's absurd mother, whom we first hear of at a book-burning in the old, pre-Gilead time - the ''right'' kind of book-burning, naturally, merely a pyre of pornographic magazines: ''Mother,'' thinks the narrator in what has become the present, ''You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one.'' The wrong kind, of course. The new world of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is a woman's world, even though governed, seemingly, and policed by men. Its ethos is entirely domestic, its female population is divided into classes based on household functions, each class clad in a separate color that instantly identifies the wearer - dull green for the Marthas (houseworkers); blue for the Wives; red, blue and green stripes for the Econowives (working class); red for the Handmaids (whose function is to bear children to the head of the household, like Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid in Genesis, but who also, in their long red gowns and white wimple-like headgear, have something of the aura of a temple harlot); brown for the Aunts (a thought-control force, part-governess, part-reform-school matron). The head of the household - whose first name the handmaid takes, adding the word ''of'' to show possession -''Offred,'' ''Ofwarren'' - is known as the Commander. It is his duty to inseminate his assigned partner, who lies on the spread thighs of his wife. THE Commanders, presumably, are the high bureaucracy of the regime, yet they are oddly powerless in the household, having no part in the administration of discipline and ceremonially subject to their aging wives. We are not told how and in what sense they govern. The oversight perhaps accounts for the thin credibility of the parable. That they lack freedom, are locked into their own rigid system, is only to be expected. It is no surprise that our narrator's commander, Fred, like a typical bourgeois husband of former times, does a bit of cheating, getting Offred to play Scrabble with him secretly at night (where books are forbidden, word games become wicked), look at his hoard of old fashion magazines (forbidden), kiss him, even go dressed in glitter and feathers to an underground bunny-type nightclub staffed by fallen women, mostly lesbian. Nor is it a surprise that his wife catches him/ them. Plusca change, plus c'est la meme chose. But that cannot be the motto for a cautionary tale, whose job is to warn of change. Infertility is the big problem of the new world and the reason for many of its institutions. A dramatically lowered birth rate, which brought on the fall of the old order, had a plurality of causes, we are told. ''The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules.'' During an earthquake, atomic power plants exploded (''nobody's fault''). A mutant strain of syphilis appeared, and of course AIDS. Then there were women who refused to breed, as an antinuclear protest, and had their tubes tied up. Anyway, infertility, despite the radical measures of the new regime, has not yet been overcome. Not only are there barren women (mostly shipped to the colonies) but a worrying sterility in men, especially among the powerful who ought to be reproducing themselves. The amusing suggestion is made, late in the book at a symposium (June 25, 2195) of Gileadean historical studies, that sterility among the Commanders may have been the result of an earlier gene-splicing experiment with mumps that produced a virus intended for insertion into the supply of caviar used by top officials in Moscow. ''The Handmaid's Tale'' contains several such touches of deft sardonic humor - for example, the television news program showing clouds of smoke over what was formerly the city of Detroit: we hear the anchorman explain that resettlement of the children of Ham in National Homeland One (the wilds of North Dakota) is continuing on schedule - 3,000 have arrived that week. And yet what is lacking, I think - what constitutes a fundamental disappointment after a promising start - is the destructive force of satire. ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' had it, ''A Clockwork Orange'' had it, even ''Brave New World'' had it, though Huxley was rather short on savagery. If ''The Handmaid's Tale'' doesn't scare one, doesn't wake one up, it must be because it has no satiric bite. The author has carefully drawn her projections from current trends. As she has said elsewhere, there is nothing here that has not been anticipated in the United States of America that we already know. Perhaps that is the trouble: the projections are too neatly penciled in. The details, including a Wall (as in Berlin, but also, as in the Middle Ages, a place where executed malefactors are displayed), all raise their hands announcing themselves present. At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined. The Aunts are a good invention, though I cannot picture them as belonging to any future; unlike Big Brother, they are more part of the past - our schoolteachers. But the most conspicuous lack, in comparison with the classics of the fearsome-future genre, is the inability to imagine a language to match the changed face of common life. No newspeak. And nothing like the linguistic tour de force of ''A Clockwork Orange'' - the brutal melting-down of current English and Slavic words that in itself tells the story of the dread new breed. The writing of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is undistinguished in a double sense, ordinary if not glaringly so, but also indistinguishable from what one supposes would be Margaret Atwood's normal way of expressing herself in the circumstances. This is a serious defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare. ONE could argue that the very tameness of the narrator-heroine's style is intended as characterization. It is true that a leading trait of Offred (we are never told her own, real name in so many words, but my textual detective work says it is June) has always been an unwillingness to stick her neck out, and perhaps we are meant to conclude that such unwillingness, multiplied, may be fatal to a free society. After the takeover, she tells us, there were some protests and demonstrations. ''I didn't go on any of the marches. Luke [ her husband ] said it would be futile, and I had to think about them, my family, him and her [ their little girl ] .'' Famous last words. But, though this may characterize an attitude - fairly widespread - it does not constitute a particular kind of speech. And there are many poetical passages, for example (chosen at random): ''All things white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock.'' Which is surely oldspeak, wouldn't you say? Characterization in general is weak in ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' which maybe makes it a poet's novel. I cannot tell Luke, the husband, from Nick, the chauffeur-lover who may be an Eye (government spy) and/ or belong to the ''Mayday'' underground. Nor is the Commander strongly drawn. Again, the Aunts are best. How sad for postfeminists that one does not feel for Offred-June half as much as one did for Winston Smith, no hero either but at any rate imaginable. It seems harsh to say again of a poet's novel - so hard to put down, in part so striking - that it lacks imagination, but that, I fear, is the problem. Mary McCarthy, whose latest book is ''Occasional Prose,'' will assume the new Stevenson Chair of Literature at Bard College beginning this fall. The Lady Was Not for Hanging The dedication of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' -''For Mary Webster and Perry Miller'' - holds clues to the novel's roots in our Puritan past. ''Mary Webster was an ancestor of mine who was hanged for a witch in Connecticut,'' Margaret Atwood explained. ''But she didn't die. They hadn't invented the drop yet'' - the part of the platform that falls away - ''so they hanged her but she lived.'' The author's studies in early American history under the Harvard scholar Perry Miller also informs her theme of religious intolerance. ''You often hear in North America, 'It can't happen here,' but it happened quite early on. The Puritans banished people who didn't agree with them, so we would be rather smug to assume that the seeds are not there. That's why I set the book in Cambridge,'' said the Canadian author, who lives in Toronto and has traveled widely in the United States. Like many of her fictional women (she has written poems, essays and novels, notably the feminist classic ''Surfacing''), she is wryly unpolemical. ''Feminist activity is not causal, it's symptomatic,'' she said of the book's antiwoman society. ''Any power structure will co-opt the views of its opponents, to sugarcoat the pill. The regime gives women some things the women's movement says they want -control over birth, no pornography - but there's a price. If you were going to put in a repressive regime, how would you do it?'' Despite the novel's projections from current events, Margaret Atwood resists calling her book a warning. ''I do not have a political agenda of that kind. The book won't tell you who to vote for,'' she said. But she advises, ''Anyone who wants power will try to manipulate you by appealing to your desires and fears, and sometimes your best instincts. Women have to be a little cautious about that kind of appeal to them. What are we being asked to give up?'' - Caryn James Return to the Books Home Page

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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

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.

In This Article

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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 Review: A Masterpiece of Intrigue and Erotica

From Director Park Chan-wook, The Handmaiden is a sumptuously artistic tale, exquisitely shot, that will leave you breathless.

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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7 best South Korean movies, ranked

South Korean media have become popular parts of international pop culture, with K-pop and K-dramas attracting countless fans around the globe. The country’s movies have similarly captivated audiences from all nations, with South Korean cinema’s bold storytelling, rich characters, and innovative filmmaking techniques garnering attention from fans and critics, not to mention award-giving bodies.

7. Burning (2018)

6. the handmaiden (2016), 5. oldboy (2003), 4. memories of murder (2003), 3. the wailing (2016), 2. the housemaid (1960), 1. parasite (2019).

From twisty thrillers like Oldboy and Memories of Murder to global sensations like Parasite and Decision to Leave , South Korean cinema has become a staple for cinephiles. Its best movies span a variety of genres and come from different generations, with each one highlighting all the different aspects and unique elements that make the country’s films worth discovering and celebrating.

Directed by Lee Chang-dong, Burning is a must-see psychological thriller with a deceptively simple plot. The film follows Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a young aspiring writer who reconnects with his childhood friend, Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo). Hae-mi asks Jong-su to take care of her cat while she travels to Africa, but upon her return, she introduces him to Ben ( Beef ‘s Steven Yeun), a rich man she met during her trip. Jong-su soon becomes suspicious of Ben’s intentions and relationship with Hae-mi, especially as they learn about the stranger’s bizarre hobby.

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Burning is a slow-burn movie, with the thriller taking its time to build an atmosphere that’s both mesmerizing and uneasy during its first half. By the time its more dramatic events unfold, viewers are likely already completely immersed in the haunting film’s world. The 2018 movie takes its time to tell its story that’s inextricably linked with class and wealth disparity, rewarding patient audiences with an unexpected ending they will remember.

The Handmaiden is a gorgeous psychological thriller set in 1930s South Korea. In it, a young Japanese heiress, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), meets her new handmaiden, Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri). Unbeknownst to Lady Hideko, Sook-Hee is part of a scheme orchestrated by a charming conman posing as a count, Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), who intends to steal her inheritance. What nobody expects is the genuine love that Lady Hideko starts to develop for Sook-Hee, who begins to feel conflicted about the plan.

Director Park Chan-wook is known for his talent for visual storytelling, with The Handmaiden being among the greatest examples of his skill. Aside from being a visually stunning film, the thriller is also full of deliciously dark humor and surprisingly intense and emotional depictions of romance, betrayal, and sexual desire. It’s a stylish and provocative work full of surprises that can shock or impress, depending on who’s watching.

Director Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy is a renowned neo-noir action thriller centered on a man named Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), who is one day kidnapped and then mysteriously imprisoned in a cell for 15 years for seemingly no reason. Upon his sudden release, he makes it his mission to discover who was responsible for his suffering, only to find himself walking into a conspiracy that could be much worse than his confinement.

Oldboy is one of the most violent action movies ever , with its flawlessly choreographed fight sequences and bloody interactions involving torture being unflinching all throughout. One particular hallway scene has become popular for the exhilarating way Oh Dae-su takes down several goons with a hammer. Of course, the 2003 movie is best known for its infamous plot twist, which leaves viewers with an incredibly disturbing ending that they won’t see coming.

Before the international hit that was Parasite , director Bong Joon-ho was already crafting intriguing thrillers like Memories of Murder . The 2003 neo-noir crime thriller is centered on a messy investigation led by detectives Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) and Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung) following gruesome murders in rural South Korea. They race against the clock to capture the unknown serial killer who targets young women.

Memories of Murder is difficult enough to watch at times, but it becomes even more unsettling when viewers learn that it’s based on a real string of crimes from the 1980s known as the Hwaseong serial murders. An expertly made crime movie , Memories of Murder greatly benefits from Bong Joon-ho’s direction, as the filmmaker infuses it with his trademark meticulous visuals and a ton of dark humor that doesn’t take away from the gravity of its story.

The Wailing is a genre-busting work by director Na Hong-jin, with the 2016 movie revolving around a small village plagued by a mysterious illness and a series of brutal murders. Police officer Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won) investigates the bizarre and dangerous events but soon encounters a sinister shaman (Hwang Jung-min) and a mysterious stranger (Jun Kunimura) rumored to be behind the chaos.

Director Na Hong-jin’s film is a fantastic blend of several horror and thriller subgenres, as it’s a possession, zombie, police procedural, drama, and even comedy all at once. It’s a slow-burn movie that showcases familiar horror tropes used in unfamiliar ways, making full use of clever cultural references and even mythology to weave its suspenseful story. Whichever way audiences want to look at it, The Wailing undeniably offers a wholly original viewing experience that horror fans will especially appreciate.

One of South Korea’s classic movies worth streaming today , 1960’s The Housemaid is a provocative domestic horror film that follows the chaos that unfolds after a middle-class family hires a young housemaid, Myeong-sook (Lee Eun-shim). She soon has an illicit affair with the family’s patriarch (Kim Jin-kyu), leading to a series of shocking and tragic events that cause the entire family to unravel.

Directed by Kim Ki-young, The Housemaid was a groundbreaking and subversive masterpiece that challenged societal and gender norms in South Korean society. Its sexually predatory femme fatale is a cleverly written and wonderfully portrayed character that embodies the unfair pressure put on women, particularly those from lower-class backgrounds. Unsurprisingly, these themes helped the film hold up incredibly well, with its message remaining relevant in any country today. It also spawned a trilogy that would explore similar subjects, with its sequels titled Woman of Fire and Woman of Fire ’82 .

Parasite is a modern masterpiece that needs no introduction. A satire, thriller, and comedy, it tells the story of the Kim family, who are used to poverty but soon find a way to temporarily escape it and experience the way the other side lives. Each family member achieves this by posing as a skilled worker for the affluent Park family, which is a scheme that seems flawless for a while, at least until the midpoint revelation.

The influential thriller with an infamous twist quickly turned director Bong Joon-ho into a household name following its premiere in 2019. After gaining international acclaim, Parasite also broke new ground in Hollywood by becoming the first ever non-English-language movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. The cinematic landmark has received numerous accolades and praise for its novel eat-the-rich narrative told with stylistic visuals, witty, dark humor, and scathing social commentary.

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Reservoir Dogs Miramax

Oftentimes, a director's first film is meant to be something of a calling card. The film itself may not be the director's best work, but it is a signal of what they would be capable of with more resources. Sometimes, though, a director emerges so fully formed that their very first movie ranks among the best things they've ever made, and, sometimes, among the best movies of all time.

For about 35 years, Jack Nicholson had a strong claim for being the best actor in Hollywood. After his breakthrough in 1969's Easy Rider, it was clear that Nicholson would become a star. With a contagious smile, signature laugh, and irresistible charm, Nicholson had the looks and the talent that made him a Hollywood leading man. Yet, Nicholson also loved to steal the show as a supporting actor, as you'll see in the rankings below.

Nicholson's résumé speaks for itself. With 12 Oscar nominations, he is the most nominated male actor in Academy Awards history. Nicholson won three times, "one for every decade," as he jokingly once said. It's hard to believe that Nicholson has not acted since 2010's How Do You Know. Yet, his legacy remains unmatched.

In modern action movies, it sure seems like great one-liners and quotes have become a lost art. There are occasionally memorable lines in films like John Wick, yet they aren't quite on the same level that they were during the 1980s and '90s. The explosions and special effects may be better now, but we miss some of the snappy writing that used to accompany these action flicks.

That's why we've put together this list of 10 great action movie quotes, and ranked them from worst to first. Much to our surprise, the No. 1 quote is from a movie that came out over five decades ago. 10. Snakes On A Plane (2006)

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