Though less violent than his other films, the charged sexual tension, otherworldly tone and claustrophobic atmosphere drawn from the film's primary location - a cavernous mansion steeped in shadow and secrets - turn the film into a sinister sizzle pot that proves just as unnerving as other high points in the director's career. Split into three sections, the story unfolds through multiple points of view and when the scheme doesn't go according to plan and a bounty of hidden truths slowly percolates to the surface, the story takes a series of unexpected turns.Ĭlosest in tone to Thirst among Park's work, his latest takes the complexities of its source material and crafts them into a dizzying concoction of desire and depravity. The plan is for Sook-hee to become the woman's maid and slowly convince her to marry Fujiwara so that he may elope with her and subsequently make away with her fortune. The Handmaiden begins when a conman who goes by Count Fujiwara employs the help of Sook-hee, a lowly pickpocket, to swindle a wealthy, lonely heiress. Transposing the novel's setting from Victorian England to 1930s Korea and Japan, when the former was a colony of the latter, The Handmaiden is a deeply engrossing, highly sexual and at times darkly humorous tale of female sexuality brought to life in spectacular fashion. Following his Hollywood foray Stoker, Park Chan-wook returns to (mostly) home soil for his sumptuous and sensual adaptation of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith.
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