After the lacklustre southern gothic excursion of Stoker, Chan-wook Park has returned to his native South Korea with an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith. Retitled as The Handmaiden and transferring its Dickensian setting to 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, The Handmaiden concerns the double-crossing machinations of three corrupt individuals; the fraudulent grifter Count Fujiwara, Lady Hideko a Korean lady who lives under the perverse tutorage of her sinister uncle and the titular handmaiden Sook-Hee a pickpocket from a family of rogues and forgers.

The plotting and double-crossing that transpires over the film’s fairly length running time, render a brief synopsis untenable. A point, I suspect, that Park would wholeheartedly agree with. Narrative purpose, logic and psychological sophistication play second fiddle to a full-bodied, sensual and fetishized aesthetic, where gloves, books and wallpaper are filmed with the same erotic thrill as the flesh of its two female protagonists. In some ways this is Park at his most Hitchcockian, a man who forged his entire career on indulging his own fetishistic pursuits. However, whereas Hitchcock imbued objects with sexual metaphor to overcome censorship regulations (Joan Fontaine snapping her purse shut to ward off Cary Grant’s amorous intentions), Park’s trinkets and totems aren’t metaphor, they are sex, they’re objects that are meant to be caressed, fingered or inserted. With Park a puppet is not just a puppet; it’s a sex toy to be dry-humped in front of a wood-panelled (the wood paneling in this film is just exquisite) room of cigar sucking men. In a way the constant gliding over surface and texture, renders the films actual sexual content as somewhat damp. By the time the two women get to some rather vigorous scissoring, its impact is tainted by the lascivious rendering of the soft furnishings, which appear to be doing something just as sexy in the background.

The Handmaiden bears some comparison to both Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, and although it’s neither as sexually explicit as the former (though I’m sure the ending was influenced by Realm’s infamous egg sequence) or as political as the later, it does share with them a Bataillean concern with the interplay between sex and death, pleasure and pain. Additionally the film features little in the way of bloodshed, a few severed fingers by means of an amateur printing press, but little of the artery sprays and organ removals we’ve come to expect of Park’s films. Instead much of the films explicit content is contained within the oral tradition of storytelling, where Lady Hideko is regularly forced by her uncle to read violently pornographic literature for the pleasure of wealthy men, the eroticism of the pieces confined to the trembling grunts and awkward shifting of her stimulated audience.

The cast are uniformly excellent, with both Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri offering up convincing Sapphic chemistry, especially the latter who imbues Sook-Hee with cunning, vulnerability and humour. It’s testament to their performances that the films fairly explicit sex scenes don’t fall exclusively into the male gaze trap. By focusing on their in-the-moment nervousness and vulnerability, and their shared joy in the face of new experiences, the film offers up something far greater than overt titillation.