[186 points / 19 votes]
“You know who doesn't get enough attention? Park Chan-wook. After making a splash with Oldboy way back in 2003, he's made a string of inventive, intricately crafted, diabolically perverse (on multiple levels) genre movies that haven't gotten nearly enough attention: the third and best part of his ‘vengeance trilogy,’ Sympathy for Lady Vengeance; a bonkers sci-fi romantic comedy that I didn't even know about until yesterday, I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK; an adaptation of a classic Émile Zola novel about adultery with added vampires, Thirst; a spin on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt starring Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman, Stoker; and last year's The Handmaiden, which is equal parts British gothic thriller, tract on Korean-Japanese relations, Polanskian provocation and The Sting-esque conman thriller. Park is a genre mixmaster on the level of Tarantino, and one with a wider, more sophisticated set of international influences who is yet still happy to include tentacle porn as part of his cinema.
“So why aren't we talking about Park these days? Possibly it's because the movies he made his name with were more masculine and action-oriented, and his films have become increasingly more interested in feminine themes, less interested in revenge for revenge's sake and more concerned with structural societal issues; multiplexes are more likely to show Korean movies if they have hammerfights than girdles.
“But this is not to say that Park is getting more respectable as he's moved from adapting manga to140-year-old French novels. The Handmaiden might feature double layers of subtitles and a plot loosely modeled on Wilkie Collins, but it still has all the Lesbian sex of an Abdellatif Kechiche movie, unapologetically presented through a very male gaze that nonetheless regards men as fools and perverts.
“Credit also goes to the broad array of craftspeople working at the tops of their games here, most of whom are longtime collaborators with Park: co-screenwriter Jeong Seo-kyeong, cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, doing some of the most velvety perfect work of the year, production designer Ryu Seong-hie and editors Kim Jae-bum and Kim Sang-bum. But special attention goes to the two women carrying the film, and both giving unusually tricky performances, Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri. Between them, they have to be sexy, crazy, seductive, seduced, defeated and victorious throughout the length of a particularly complex, plot-heavy film.
“For me, this is the kind of film that represents a kind of platonic summation of what movies can do: look beautiful, be made with precision and total control of tone and concept, be constantly surprising and inventive, be simultaneously part of its world and part of a totally synthetic formal realm; and leave you someplace that you didn't expect to be. No 2016 movie was more baroquely beautiful and grotesque to me than The Handmaiden.” ~ Jeff McMahon
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