What are you willing to sacrifice for freedom? For the pickpocket Sook-hee, freedom means working with a conman to help him seduce a Japanese heiress. For the conman ‘count Fujiwara’ it means marrying rich and disposing of his new wife in an asylum. As for the Japanese heiress Hideko, raised in a seclusion by her uncle, freedom means escaping, no matter what that looks like.

In adapting this from the book (The Fingersmith) for film, Park Chan-wook transposed the story from Victorian England to Japanese occupied Korea. Here Park’s typical power games and revenge plots play out between occupied and occupier, uncle and niece, husband and wife, heiress and handmaiden. This is not the first time he’s telling a story of an isolated girl reversing the prey-hunter relationship (see: Stoker, 2013) or duplicitous characters with morally dark-grey motives (see: Lady Vengeance, 2005. Actually, see Park’s entire oeuvre). This film showcases Park’s strength as director; he creates a kind of voyeuristic narrative tension while shifting power across axes of class, gender, and in this case colonialism. In the end, the question of The Handmaiden is not what you’re willing to sacrifice for freedom. It’s what freedom should look like to make it worth the sacrifice. –Marieke

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