Oldboy and Lady Vengeance director Park Chan-Wook has proven himself of a savvy purveyor of elegant violence, transforming his scripts’ most brutal set pieces into displays of virtuosic camera movement and precise framing.
But in The Handmaiden, a twisty triangle of secrets and lies based on a Victorian bodice-ripper, the South Korean stylist fashions himself less a polisher of sadism than an aesthete of eros. Copulation, whether discussed or depicted, is everywhere in The Handmaiden, and by the end of the picture you’ll either want to have sex for a week or never have it again, or somehow both: a properly confused response for a movie that, for all its prestigious historical-cinematic-literary trappings, is at best shamefully arresting.
It needn’t have been this way, considering the atmospheric promise of its opening stanzas. If Park’s 2011 feature Stoker borrowed liberally from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, The Handmaiden lifts its gothic menace from Rebecca: Sookee (Kim Tae-ri) is an innocent naïf who arrives at a mansion shrouded in death and mystery. She is to be the handmaiden to Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a virginal heiress whose mother died in childbirth and whose demented aunt, she soon reveals to the wide-eyed Sookee, hanged herself on the cherry tree outside. On moonless nights, she adds, you can still see her corpse dangling from a branch.
The Handmaiden is not a horror film, but scenes like this echo with the goose-pimpled vibrations of Daphne du Maurier, Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, it’s based on Welsh novelist Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a 2002 thriller, later adapted for television, rooted in Victorian menace. Park transposed her story, with its understanding of Britain’s caste system, to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s, with Sookee’s status as lowly Korean insuring her exploitation. Otherwise, any hope for probing geopolitical inquiry proves merely narrative window-dressing. Cultural specificity is quickly jettisoned in favor of the film’s increasingly silly and mendacious plot.
You see, Sookee isn’t just a handmaiden. She’s working in collusion with a penniless art-forging con man, “Count” Fujiwara (Ha Jung-Woo), to capture Lady Hideko’s heart and, soon after, her sizable inheritance. Once the marriage is consummated, he’ll gaslight his new bride to the loony bin and provide Sookee with a percentage of his newfound fortune, with nobody the wiser.
At least that’s how it seems in part one of this perspective-shifting triptych. Needless to say, like any best-laid plan, it crumbles like wax paper. With narration this unreliable — with reality in the jaundiced eyes of so many beholders — we learn to believe nothing we’re shown or told. The result is less like being tasked with putting together a compelling puzzle than to endure the puzzle’s creator periodically wiping our progress clean and dumping a new batch of jigsaws in front of us, exclaiming “gotcha!” so many times until we know longer care about completing the picture.
The Handmaiden’s language of suspense is older than Agatha Christie’s, from poisoned wineglasses to mercury-laced cigarettes to madwomen in sanitaria, all of which come across as borrowed footholds on a narrative mountain of implausibility. Park dares us to follow his nonsensical maze, with its convenient escape hatches and equally convenient dead ends. It’s all delivered with strikingly little of the director’s signature black humor, except perhaps in its fanciful sex scenes, the central of which, between Hideko and Sookee, plays out twice from different angles. As Sookee prepares to orally pleasure the suppressed heiress for ostensibly the first time, Park channels his inner Almodovar with an extended vaginal POV, a moment hilarious in its abject crassness.
The rest of the scene is all quickening moans and impossibly skinny bodies in limb-flailing combinations, the straight-male fantasy of lesbian intimacy. As one of those straight males, I admit there are worse things to look at, but it’s a vast remove from art. Some unforgettable imagery notwithstanding, The Handmaiden is ultimately as inconsequential as an airport paperback and as calorically empty as porn.
THE HANDMAIDEN. Director: Park Chan-Wook; Cast: Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-Woo, Kim Min-hee, Cho Jin-Woong; Distributor: Magnolia; Opens: Friday at Cinemark Palace in Boca Raton, Miami Beach Cinematheque and Coral Gables Art Cinema