The Handmaiden

The Geometry of Desire

To adapt Sarah Waters’ *Fingersmith*, a Victorian crime novel of soot and fog, into the lush, manicured landscape of 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea is an act of audacious translation. Yet, Park Chan-wook’s *The Handmaiden* (2016) is less a translation than a transmutation. Park, a director whose filmography is often stained with the operatic violence of *Oldboy* or the theological despair of *Thirst*, here turns his surgical precision toward a different kind of brutality: the rigid architecture of colonialism and the fluid chaos of love. It is a film that presents itself as a con artist’s puzzle box—gilded, intricate, and deceptively hollow—only to reveal a beating, human heart hidden in a false bottom.



Visually, *The Handmaiden* is a masterpiece of containment. Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon uses the camera not just to record, but to imprison. The film is dominated by the terrifying symmetry of Uncle Kouzuki’s estate—a monstrous hybrid of English Gothic stone and Japanese paper screens. The camera glides through long corridors with a voyeuristic smoothness, constantly framing characters through doorways, mirrors, and windows. We are always watching someone being watched. This creates a suffocating atmosphere where privacy is the ultimate luxury. The production design emphasizes this duality: the Western wing is cold, dark, and masculine, housing the library of pornography where men consume women as fiction; the Japanese wing is bright, soft, and ostensibly feminine, though no less a prison.

The film’s central discourse inevitably circles the "male gaze," a concept Park complicates rather than simply rejects. The story is structured in three parts, shifting perspectives to peel back layers of deception. Initially, we see the women through the eyes of the men who seek to exploit them—Count Fujiwara, the swindler, and Kouzuki, the pervert. To them, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) is a fragile doll and Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) is a useful idiot. But as the perspective shifts, we see the women reclaiming their own narrative.



This reclamation is most visceral in the film’s treatment of intimacy. The famous scene where Sook-hee files down a sharp tooth in Hideko’s mouth is charged with more erotic tension than the graphic sex scenes that follow. It is a moment of care masquerading as service, a subversion of the master-servant dynamic where the act of "tending to" becomes an act of possession. The sensory details—the sound of the file, the steam of the bath, the taste of a lollipop—overwhelm the rigid social structures that are supposed to keep these women apart. When they finally destroy the Uncle’s library, tearing up his books and drowning them in water, it is not just a rejection of his control, but a cleansing of the very language used to objectify them.



Ultimately, *The Handmaiden* succeeds because it allows its characters to be complexly human rather than mere symbols of liberation. Sook-hee is scrappy and unrefined; Hideko is damaged and initially cruel. Their romance is not a sanitized fairy tale but a conspiracy of two. In a cinema landscape often obsessed with grim realism or sanitized fantasy, Park offers a third way: a baroque, sensual thriller where the artificiality of the filmmaking highlights the genuine nature of the emotions. It is a film that reminds us that while men may build the cages, it is women who hold the keys.