WITH “THE HANDMAIDEN,” Park uses sex with the same deliberate force as he once used violence. He was initially drawn to the intense eroticism of “Fingersmith,” about a lesbian con artist in Victorian England, as well as to the English countryside setting, but for his adaptation, he instead set the story in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea. Park was interested in the way Japanese sympathizers believed Japan would rule forever, and hoped to erase their Korean identities. The result is a lavish stereoscopic historical fiction about the difference between obsession and love, even as it is also subtly a story about what it means to be Korean, when the world, and even your own self, is trying to take that from you. Sookee is the daughter of a famous thief, determined to make a score that will let her leave Korea and travel the world. She has been hired by a young grifter, Count Fujiwara, to help him seduce the Lady Hideko, a young Japanese noblewoman raised in almost complete seclusion by her Uncle Kouzouki, who intends to marry her when she’s of age and take possession of her considerable fortune. Sookee will be Hideko’s new maid, and is to fulfill her duty from within the intimate realm of her new mistress’s confidences. But when Sookee first meets Hideko, running to her side after she screams in the night for help, she is immediately drawn to her, and soon falls in love with her. The film proceeds from there in a series of stunning reversals, as the central characters transform themselves again and again.

Hideko is, unknown to Sookee, not the doomed innocent heiress Sookee imagines her to be, but the star of her uncle’s rarefied erotic cabaret, appearing in readings of erotica staged for his Japanese and Japanese sympathizer friends, who sit dressed in white tie in his elegant library, in lustful awe of Hideko as she performs. Her uncle is so enamored of Japanese culture he has become a naturalized Japanese citizen. In the film, Japanese is spoken to assert cultural power or privilege; Korean is spoken as an assertion of intimacy and camaraderie. One of Park’s favorite scenes in the film is when Hideko climbs a cherry tree to hang herself. She lets herself drop, ready to die, but falls only a little: As the camera pans down, you see Sookee, defiant, holding her feet, crying out from love for her. As Hideko and Sookee confess their true feelings to each other, and the lovers escape, they begin speaking Korean in private, eventually forgoing Japanese almost entirely.

“The Handmaiden” was such a phenomenon that Yongsan CGV, a massive multiplex at one of Seoul’s most popular malls, has dedicated one of its theaters in Park’s honor. The theater is kept to the director’s specifications, with a plaque on the outside in his likeness, and a gallery where he can display his photos and props from his films, including one of Lady Hideko’s suitcases, looking almost as if she forgot it there. Located near one of the main American army bases in South Korea, it is a fitting tribute to Park’s childhood spent watching movies on the American Forces Korea Network: a personal monument, but also a celebration of the Korean cinematic culture that he once longed for, now growing up with and around him.