The Handmaiden

There has always been something beautiful in the way Park Chan-Wook uses his camera to tell a story, as if it is a voyeur that need to be subtle in its movements to don't be discovered, and in no other film of his catalogue, it makes as much sense as in The Handmaiden.

In his first historic piece, Park Chan-Wook adapts the novel Fingersmith from Sarah Waters, and changes the setting from the Victorian England to Korea under the Japanese colonial rule. The story, dealing with a woman who is convinced to participate in the tricking of a rich woman becoming her maid and persuading her on marrying a fake noble, so he can inherit her fortune, only to find herself falling in love with the mysterious rich woman. The screenplay is designed to reveal things in small doses, leading to two major plot twists that make the story even better, and here is when the director makes a superb interpretation with the camera work, he puts it there, as an observant that gets the details revealed slowly, but that wants to engulf all the beauty and all the brutality of what is seeing, thus the cinematography flows smoothly, filling every scene with details, that at times get very graphic, but never misses the chance to make an aesthetic experience of every single one of them. The art direction is also outstanding, very precise in creating worlds and atmospheres that let us know about the characters and their world.

Probably the best asian filmmaker nowadays, Park Chan-Wook offers us a film that is round in every single aspect, a great story that keeps you interested from the whole time, a fine direction that offers much more than what the story says, all of them packed in a beautiful, intelligent aesthetic that is helping the story we are facing.