‘Handmaiden’ a fever dream from South Korea’s Park

Park made his name internationally in the 2000s with three films that came to be known as the Vengeance Trilogy, including the cult favorite “Oldboy.”

Soonhee (Kim Tai-ree), a young member of a criminal gang, is sent to work as a handmaiden at the mansion of the Japanese heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee).

Soonhee’s real job is to pave the way for the gang’s chief, the Count (Ha Jung-woo), a handsome forger and con man who aims to marry Hideko and make off with her fortune.

Hideko is a hothouse flower completely under the thumb of her Korean uncle (Cho Jin-woong), an arrogant voluptuary who forces her to read Sadean pornography for the pleasure of his aristocratic pals.

The novel’s theme of class warfare gets an extra twist here as it is complicated by the gulf between the Japanese and Korean characters.

[...] Park is so insistent that we bear in mind this historical antagonism that the movie provides different colors of English subtitles for the Korean and Japanese dialogue — though some subtleties, of course, will be lost on nonnative speakers.

Between the eroticism and the luscious visual textures throughout, director essentially puts the audience in the position of the sybarites who pant over Hideki’s readings.

[...] “The Handmaiden” registers as a glorious vision that’s been inflated — with wonderfully perfumed air, but still inflated — beyond its limits.