The last sex scene of Park Chan-wook’s new erotic thriller The Handmaiden prominently features a sparkly pair of silver Ben Wa balls. Earlier in the film, they’d been used as a weapon; now they’re serving a very different purpose. Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) and Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) are fully naked, facing each other while precariously balanced on their knees. They’re in what looks like a ship’s first-class cabin, resplendent with plush, colorful furniture and ornate frames on the walls. As they fit their bodies together and insert the Ben Wa balls inside their respective vaginas, a merry tinkling noise accompanies the women’s giggles — Sook-hee and Hideko are, for the first time, fully and completely at ease with each other. Their beautiful, lithe bodies are arranged in perfect symmetry, just like the room around them. The scene is an immaculately arranged tableau.

It would be stunning, if it weren’t also so laughably absurd. Whose sex life looks remotely like this?

The Handmaiden, from the South Korean visionary who brought us Oldboy, is exquisitely composed and deftly plotted — by many accounts, a masterpiece. Park adapted the script from Fingersmith, a novel by the Welsh writer Sarah Waters, but transported the characters from Victorian-era Britain to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. What at first looks like the story of one long con becomes an intricate tale told in three acts, detailing a complex web of double-crossings and shifting allegiances. As Lady Hideko’s new maid, Sook-hee is tasked with convincing Hideko to fall in love with Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), a lowly Korean con man posing as a Japanese nobleman. Though she feigns naïveté and sweetness, Sook-hee is, in reality, a conniving pickpocket, working for Fujiwara to help steal Hideko’s fortune; after he marries her, the two plan to dispose of Hideko in a mental hospital. Everything is going according to plan, until Sook-hee and Hideko start falling for each other.

In a film that traffics in duplicity, role-play, and cultural code-switching, the various sex scenes throughout are far from unwarranted; rather, two out of the three actively propel the plot forward. (And two out of three ain’t bad.) Still, every sex scene manages, at one point or another, to reify stale tropes about lesbian fornication – including a silly overemphasis on scissoring — all of which are bothersome distractions from an otherwise spellbinding film. More broadly, these sorts of sex scenes position female bodies as gorgeous objects: metaphorical stand-ins for questions about art, beauty, and the dark side of desire.

Since it competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes this past May, The Handmaiden’s graphic sex scenes have inspired inevitable comparisons to Abdellatif Kechiche’s infamously sex-heavy Blue Is the Warmest Color, which competed for — and won — the Palme d’Or in 2013. Both films also share a certain ethos with Todd Haynes’ Carol, which was the equivalent Cannes darling in 2015. The three most critically acclaimed films of the decade about queer women are all by distinguished male auteurs, and all are based on fiction written by lesbians: Blue Is the Warmest Color was originally a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, while Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt became Carol.

Though they take place in different countries and time periods and languages, the films share a visual sumptuousness; they are veritable marvels for the senses. Each one delights, and indulges, in the gorgeousness of the women they feature, especially when those women get undressed. The resulting depictions of lesbian sex as choreographed by these male directors are, at best, well-intentioned attempts to honor the beauty of queer female sexuality — but at worst, they’re formalist experiments in symmetry and duality (Hey, they’re having sex and they’re both women! They look alike! See? Pretty!) that can easily become flat-out fetishistic.