The Handmaiden (2016)

Park Chan-wook’s ingenious adaptation of Fingersmith is unmissable, a lushly photographed, dizzyingly erotic thriller full of delicious twists. The critic singles out the palpable sexual chemistry between the leads and the extraordinarily beautiful cinematography.

Park Chan-wook has followed up Stoker with what might be his best film, a superlative thriller and deeply erotic character study. The critic singles out the intelligence, mordant wit and depth of characterisation as the real turn-ons.

This is a masterwork more than the sum of its dazzling parts, confirming the awesome redemptive power of love. The critic singles out the intricate details and twists that make it impossible to pigeonhole and tempt a second viewing.

The fiendishly clever con-job melodrama keeps yanking the rug out from under everyone, yet it is also the year’s most genuinely romantic movie. The director’s gonzo adaptation locates moving human feeling and a feminist edge amid the twists and explicit set pieces.

Park delivers a lush, romantic, crowd-pleasing melodrama that channels his perversity with discipline and style. The year’s most irresistible romance emerges from the women’s sparks and the film’s formal constraints, turning oppression into wellsprings of love.

Park's film is his most delectable to date, an illicitly suave puzzle that takes pleasure in fooling with the characters' intricate plans and the audience's minds. It is drenched in longing and desire through role reversals and the leads' performances.

Park unfurls an ambitious three-part noir of violent beatings, sexual deviance and cathartic feminist revenge, though his exuberance sometimes masks sharper observations. It remains a hugely enjoyable dose of grotesque escapism from a master of the form.

The review highlights the film's satisfying layers of con-artist twists and well-structured acts punctuated by eroticism as key strengths. It commends the sumptuous visuals blended with perverse humour, calling it one of Park's boldest works.

The review calls it an unexpected delight and the director’s most absorbing feature in years, a witty and elegant puzzle-box thriller whose pleasures are rooted in narrative surprise. It seduces with the women's fight for physical, sexual and national freedom rather than visceral shock.

The critic describes the film as a beautiful, disturbing adaptation that luxuriates in decadence as both subject and style, with masterful visuals and a resonant love story. He notes some pacing issues and mixed messages but finds it smart, sumptuous and indulgent overall.

Park achieves a profound leap as an artist with seductive mood, intimate emotional obsession and masterful craftsmanship in a period gothic. He retreats to lurid cartoonishness just as he has earned the viewer’s trust after the film’s most amazing sequence.

Park Chan-wook’s competition entry is a seductively shot erotic thriller that locates a genuine erotic charge between its two female leads. The critic singles out the visual elegance and fetishization of props, costumes and storytelling.

Park's adaptation is clever, heady and sensually lavish but slides back into his febrile universe of eroticized torture and misogyny, submerging the theme of female rebellion. Production values are sensational even by Korean cinema’s standards.

The review finds the transposition of Fingersmith to Japanese-occupied Korea a strong fit, with persuasive new milieu, playful humour, photogenic sex and baroque cruelty. It notes some simplification of the novel's complexity but praises its commercial potential.

The critic praises Park Chan-wook's hyper-elaborate adaptation of Fingersmith for its intricate, mutable narrative and spectacular gothic mansion setting that mirrors the story's shifting deceptions. He notes the film's visual and thematic ambition but questions whether its erotic elements objectify the female leads.

Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, relocated to 1930s Korea, is an erotic triumph with a whiplash twist. The critic singles out the explosive attraction and outstanding performances between the two lead actresses for praise.

Park Chan-wook’s kinky erotic thriller and love story brims with delicious surprises and exquisite filming, making its long runtime fly by. The playful reworking of the source novel into a multi-perspective narrative set in 1930s colonial Korea delivers irony and catharsis.

The critic praises the film's refined eroticism and visual textures in a slippery con story set in 1930s Korea. Park Chan-wook's attention to voluptuous detail turns each scene into an invitation to the senses while delivering narrative sleights of hand.

The critic praises the film as a magnificent, even flawless piece of cinema and a pointed parable about the repression of female sexuality. They single out its surprising yet logical twists, elegant direction, sumptuous score, and superb acting, especially from Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee.

Park Chan-wook's most accomplished film to date is a perverse yet exhilarating thriller with flawless direction blending humor, grotesquerie, and romance. The intricate, multi-layered storytelling and opulent style make it a singular cinematic experience.

The critic hails it as a sexy, stylish, and hilariously perverse psychological thriller with masterful direction, great performances from the leads, and a fun, twisted narrative about lies, desire, and sex that goes down easy.

The Handmaiden exemplifies Park's mastery through its purposeful aesthetic care in an overwrought sexual melodrama about cons, fortunes, and unexpected romance. The explicit sex scenes are staged with microscopic attention to bodies and self-discovery.

The film is a masterful, entertaining erotic thriller with dark twists that challenges expectations while remaining immensely engaging. The critic praises its complex storytelling and performances but notes some uneven subtext in the sex scenes.

The critic calls it a deliriously fun, terminally silly Gothic melodrama with lavishly sumptuous craft and gloss that makes the twisty potboiler pleasurable, celebrating female triumph and lesbian desire while fetishizing period details.

The critic calls it a career high for Park, with assured control of tone, pitch-black humour, and maximalist style, describing it as a darkly comic study in sex, class and Japanese-Korean relations. They single out its carnal heart and candid exploration of the full spectrum of sex.

The critic praises the film's sumptuous, erotic crime story with a rapturously conceived plot involving sex, secrets, and spite. They single out the exuberant performances, especially Kim Min-hee's, and Park's playful genre provocation.

The critic praises the elegant, luscious world Park creates in this transposition of Fingersmith, highlighting the film's humor, highly-charged sex scenes, beautiful lead performances, and how the women triumph over male domination.

Park Chan-wook refines his signature style into an exquisite psychological erotic thriller that maintains plot momentum and fun over 145 minutes. The sex scenes are highlighted for their tenderness and romance rather than mere titillation.