This review contains plot details of “The Handmaiden”

PARK CHAN-WOOK began his career as a critic rather than an auteur. The film that persuaded the acclaimed Korean director that his calling lay behind the camera rather than bathed in the light of the screen was “Vertigo” (1958), Alfred Hitchcock’s twisted tale of love, terror, voyeurism, deceit and assumed identities. It is fitting that Mr Park’s “The Handmaiden” deftly deals with many of the same themes. It is so masterly that it too is likely to inspire a new generation of film-makers.

“The Handmaiden” opens with a young Korean woman, Tamako (Kim Tae-ri), handing over a baby to a sobbing familial group in a poor, mud-sodden neighbourhood. She is leaving to be a maid for the niece of a wealthy Japanese scholar, Kouzuki. Approached by a grand, tree-lined drive, Tamako’s new home is an enormous pile in a chimerical hybrid of Japanese and English styles, complete with a baffling array of annexes, wings, a bower-filled garden and secret basement complex. As it transpires, this house makes an apt setting for the film, in which nothing and no one are quite what they seem. Just as the footprint of the house seems to roil with a life of its own, so too do its characters. No sooner have we fathomed their motivations and desires then the viewpoint shifts, leaving the viewer enthralled and off-balance, forced to reassess everything they were sure they knew.

The plot, like the setting, is fiendishly dense and complex. Mr Park unfolds it in three parts, each from a different perspective and each revealing fresh insights to the viewer. Tamako, our Korean maid who, Cinderella-like, sleeps in a cupboard outside her mistress’s bedroom, is not the meek servant she at first appears. In fact, she is really Sook-Hee, a cunning pickpocket and plant. Her role is to make her mistress, the Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), fall in love with the handsome Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), without succumbing to the mistress’s allure herself. The count, meanwhile, is not a count at all but a forger and conman—still with me?—bent on marrying Hideko for her money and then committing her to an asylum.

The counterfeit count isn’t the only one with designs on Lady Hideko. Uncle Kouzuki (played in dashingly sinister style by Jo Jin-woong), a book collector with his tongue blackened by ink, also plans to marry his niece, secure her fortune and satisfy his social pretentions and depraved lusts (those books and scrolls he has so diligently amassed turn out to be outré works of pornography.) Yet Lady Hideko has hidden depths, too. Raised in virtual confinement by her sadistic uncle and forced to recite debauched scenes from his favourite books to satiate his wealthy clients, she has grown cold, cunning and fearful. She is so used to playing her parts that she has become locked away from her true self.

The source material for the film is “Fingersmith”, Sarah Waters’ capricious and capacious novel from 2002. But Mr Park’s interpretation has benefitted greatly from a cross-pollination of Korean and Western influences. Gone is the Dickensian setting, replaced instead with Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s with a palette of poison-bright and dusty greens, blossom whites and crimsons. This period allows his characters nuanced motives and emphasises the shifting balances of power and control that writhe through the film. Uncle Kouzuki wants to be accepted in Japanese society; part of Count Fujiwara’s act is to appear to be Japanese, while in reality he’s been raised by Korean fishermen. The dialogue takes place in both languages to help emphasise the social order (yellow subtitles for Japanese; white ones for Korean). And, while some characters are in Western dress, others wear local styles. Lady Hideko usually wears high-necked dresses underpinned with old-fashioned corsetry, but while performing she reads aloud in traditional Japanese costume. Her audience, meanwhile, fidget restlessly as their erections begin to press against their tight black tie suit trousers.

Avid fans of “Oldboy” (2003) will be pleased to hear that Mr Park has included several octopus references here too (a cephalopod meets a memorably revolting end in the earlier film). One of Uncle Kouzuki’s favourite artworks is an erotic print by Hokusai, “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”, which features a woman writhing in ecstasy, entwined in the arms of two octopuses. The uncle also keeps a gigantic live specimen in his secret basement, where it seethes in its too-small tank, waiting for its moment to take part in whatever unspeakable act Kouzuki unearths from the repulsive reaches of his imagination.

Indeed, the film’s eroticism never stems from the crass desires of either Uncle Kouzuki or the count, who are both too creepily consumed by their own appetites to be remotely sexy. (The latter, in a near-rape scene, assures his victim: “It won’t hurt…in truth, women feel the greatest pleasure when taken by force.”) Instead it is the growing connection and intimacy between the two women, both ostensibly mere pawns, that yields the film’s most erotic moments and, ultimately, is the focus of its conclusion. Although mid-way through viewers might feel that nothing and no one can be trusted, this is not quite true. In the end you can, it seems, trust true love.