Ridiculous male spectators are left frantically fanning their red faces and squirming awkwardly in their seats 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). Park transfers the story from Victorian England to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule. 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. 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. 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. Inspired by Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith, The Handmaiden is a playfully provocative tale of seduction, desire and deceit. T here are giddy pleasures to be found in this rip-roaringly ripe erotic thriller/melodrama from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook.
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