Selected by Emerald Fennell as part of her Love Stories programme at BFI IMAX, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden arrives already framed as an exemplary but disruptive romance. It is a positioning that feels both apt and slightly provocative. Adapted from Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, Park’s film is lush and attentive to female desire, with its priorities diverge tellingly from the source: less a thriller of reversals than a meditation on love, and the performance of love.
Park relocates the story to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. There, Japanese culture is presented as formalised, ceremonial, and performative, while Korean identity is coded as earthy, grassroot, and somewhat rebellious. While on Waters’s novel, illiteracy primarily articulates the power-dynamic between classes, The Handmaiden refracts it as colonial hierarchies. Gender politics, too, are sharpened through adaptation. The destruction of the library in The Handmaiden stands as the film’s most explicit feminist intervention.
This comes at a cost. Park’s film is less invested in mystery than Waters’s novel, whose pleasures lie in narrative misdirection, delayed revelations, and the destabilising act of retelling itself. In The Handmaiden, the reversals still arrive, but they no longer feel like epistemic shocks in structural suspense. but simply serve as steps toward romantic alignment.
This emphasis on romance also shapes the film’s erotic register. The sex scenes are meticulously composed, often striking, with some traits of the self-conscious, slightly self-orientalised elegance between Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri that overplays their chemistry. In the meantime, the figure of the Count (Ha Jung-woo) further illustrates Park’s reading of (unrequited) desire. Unlike Waters’s Gentleman, whose interest is sheerly wealth-driven, the Count openly craves Hideko. This adaptation aligns with the film’s investment in overt passion.
The Handmaiden is a film of remarkable craft, one that reimagines Fingersmith, a masterpiece of narrative trickery, through the lenses of colonial history and cinematic performativity, into a sensual romance. If Waters’s novel asks who gets to write the story, Park’s adaptation is more interested in who gets to perform it, and how. As part of a programme interrogating love under pressure, The Handmaiden makes sense: it is a love story forged through constraint, artifice, and resistance. In the meantime, its smooth surfaces and emphatic gestures also invite scrutiny: what it reveals, what it hides, what has been appropriated for the sake of performance and what ultimately is missing.
Emerald Fennell curates “Love Stories” is at BFI IMAX throughout February. For tickets and listing, please visit here. “Wuthering Heights” opens at BFI IMAX from 13 February. For tickets and listing, please visit here.