The Handmaiden movie review & film summary (2016)

So here we go, somewhat vaguely, into the breach: nothing is what it seems in this movie, and the things that aren’t what they seem aren’t quite what they don’t seem to be, if that makes any sense at all (and if it doesn’t right now, trust me: it will). Most of the story takes place in and around the book collector’s country estate, a splendidly realized creation that’s not just one of the great mansions in film history—rivaled in recent movies only by the estate in another modern Gothic romance, “Crimson Peak”—but also an organizing metaphor for the whole film. It seems to change size and shape depending on a visitor’s angle of approach, and once you’re inside it, the geography at first seems so clear that you could draw floor plans of its most frequently used spaces; but after a few more scenes, you realize that you only saw a small part of the house, and not only are there rooms and wings you’ve never laid eyes on, there are secret doors and hidden passageways that only certain characters know about, leading to places where they can go to make love, commit sadistic acts of violence, or spy on each other. Soon enough, the movie teaches you how to watch it, and you start asking questions, like, “What does this person truly hope to gain from sneaking here, doing this, stealing that?” and “Are they really spying in secret, or do the spied-upon people know somebody is watching?" and “Are the emotions being expressed by that character real, or are they faking it, or are they seeming to fake it while actually feeling those feelings?”

A good many moments resonate not because of what one character is saying, but because of the looks on other characters’ faces as they hear their words and either contemplate their true meaning or visualize images to accompany them. One of many show-stopping setpieces is a reading of perverse erotica from the book collector’s library, accompanied by one of the weirdest sex shows in mainstream cinema, but most of the sequence’s eerie power derives from observing the rapt expressions of men who’ve gathered to hear explicit fiction read aloud. Nearly as powerful, though far subtler, are the cross-cut sequences that feel like self-contained short stories of their own. Dialogue or recited scraps of letters or fiction become de facto narration laid over a cascade of images, brilliantly composed for a very wide frame by Chung Chung-hoon, and backed by Cho Young-wuk’s hypnotically repetitive yet rapturously melodramatic score, which rises to operatic heights when the characters are experiencing misery, ecstasy or fear.

Park’s sense of texture and color seems as intuitive as a painter’s, but the film’s narrative construction is as right-brained as Christopher Nolan at his wonkiest. "The Handmaiden" is neatly diced into thirds, each approximately 45 minutes long, each narrated by a different major character with parenthetical mini-narratives embedded within each, Russian nesting doll-style. As you ease into the middle third, you start to see moments and images revisited from different angles, seen or heard from fresh vantage points, or picked up slightly earlier or slightly later, altering their meaning or revealing previously withheld facts. The result is a rare film that could be equally well-represented by a billboard-sized collage of randomly chose still-frames, and a flowchart. “Even listening to the same story, people imagine different things,” a character warns us, so deep into the movie that the line plays not like a revelation, but a confirmation of what we we’ve been feeling in our marrow.