The Handmaiden Review: Sex, Lies and Riveting Escape

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.

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.

“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.