Film review: Deception drives Park’s wicked thriller ‘The Handmaiden’

“The Handmaiden” is as twisty, venomous and sexually frank a film as we’ve come to expect from South Korean director Park Chan-wook, a tale of deceit and infidelity that’s something of a con itself. That’s not to say the movie cheats the audience as its complex, crafty plot unfolds; it’s tricky and wickedly funny in ways we don’t anticipate, and the less you know about it, the better.

At first glance, the story appears to be a deconstruction of Victorian drawing room melodramas, and that’s because it is. Park has transplanted the knotty plot of Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel “Fingersmith” from 19th-century England to Japanese-occupied Korea of the 1930s. The relocation works seamlessly in the film’s exploration of cultural impropriety and the schisms between social classes, though Park is unsurprisingly more concerned with violent retribution and explicit sex than Waters. (The movie is being released unrated, likely because the MPAA would have slapped it with an NC-17.)

The devious operation at the center of “The Handmaiden” begins with a Korean conman, played by Jung-woo Ha, who’s pretending to be a wealthy count in order to grift the unstable Japanese heiress Hideko (Min-hee Kim). His plan is to marry her, forcefully institutionalize her and then run off with her fortune, and he recruits an orphaned, illiterate female pickpocket named Sook-hee (Tae-ri Kim) to assist him by posing as the rich woman’s newest chambermaid. In return for her services, Sook-hee will receive Hideko’s lavish wardrobe.

Using lithe, playful camerawork and Chung Chung-hoon’s lush, painterly cinematography, Park creates a vivid world of repression and titillation inside the lonely estate. (Appropriately, its design is a mash-up of British and Japanese architectural styles.) The mansion is lorded over by Hideko’s lecherous uncle, his tongue stained black with ink, who plans to marry his niece before the count does. He produces forgeries of rare erotic books and paintings and sells them for top dollar, forcing Hideko to read his depraved stories aloud to audiences of paying noblemen.

But nothing in this film is as it initially appears. The chemistry between Hideko and Sook-hee is erotically charged from the get-go, and their passing flirtation soon develops into an intense love affair. And as the young handmaiden becomes more entranced by her employer, the more she second guesses her nefarious intentions.

That’s as much information as any review of “The Handmaiden” should divulge; it’s best to allow the film to lead you down its garden path. The plot soon folds in on itself and then branches off in unexpected directions, and each reversal puts everything we’ve seen before in startling new contexts. Even if you’ve read “Fingersmith” or seen the BBC miniseries it inspired, you’ll still be blindsided by some of the nasty surprises Park and co-writer Chung Seo-kyung have up their sleeves.

But the most potent element of “The Handmaiden” is the burgeoning relationship between Hideko and Sook-hee. Both women are playing roles at the behest of men – Hideko as the demure, submissive male fantasy, Sook-hee as a helpless cog in the count’s scheme – but they’re also putting on performances for one another, and that ever-shifting dynamic becomes the film’s most compelling (and ultimately moving) mystery. Like Park’s terrific “Lady Vengeance” (2005), this is really a film about resourceful, canny women retaliating against an environment that suppresses and exploits them.

Park is perhaps South Korea’s most acclaimed filmmaker, and much of his work is hyperviolent and deeply disturbing. “The Handmaiden” isn’t, despite its graphic sexuality, nearly as lurid and flashy as much of Park’s previous work, though it carries over his pet themes of madness, perversity, revenge and dark family secrets. It may very well be the great director’s most accomplished film so far.