Korean genre stylist Park Chan-wook is best known to Western audiences for his “Vengeance” trilogy: a trio of malevolent, blackly comic thrillers that included his 2003 breakout hit, “Oldboy.” But his recent films have coalesced into an informal trilogy of their own, linked by a shared enthusiasm for gothic atmospherics and erotic psychodrama.
After “Thirst” (Catholics, vampires) and the English-language “Stoker” (psychopaths, incest) comes “The Handmaiden,” a torrid suspense piece loosely based on Sarah Waters’ cod-Dickensian lesbian crime novel, “Fingersmith.” Park shifts the action from Victorian England to 1930s Korea, and his script, co-written with regular collaborator Jeong Seo-kyeong, teases the latent absurdity out of Waters’ tale.
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