--- title: "The Handmaiden (2016) review" description: "Hollywood stopped making erotic thrillers. Thank god Korea didn’t." url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/the-handmaiden/ --- ![A still from The Handmaiden (2016)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/the-handmaiden/backdrop.webp) # The Handmaiden (2016) Jun 24, 2026 | 4 min read | Rated 5 out of 5 | Dir. Park Chan-wook Hollywood stopped making erotic thrillers. Thank god Korea didn’t. I spent the first third of this film thinking it was one of the most sloppily edited movies I’d ever seen. Then I realized: the structure is the point. The three-part narrative isn’t just a clever trick - it’s about who controls the story, and who’s being deceived. In Part One, we see events from Sook-hee’s perspective and assume we understand what’s happening. We’re wrong. The film is conning the audience the same way the characters are conning each other. In Part Two, Hideko takes control of the narrative, and we realize the women have been playing the Count - and us - the entire time. The film is literally about women seizing authorship of their own stories from the men who think they’re running the show. That “sloppy” feeling in Act One is the film withholding the truth from us, making us complicit in underestimating these women. This is adapted from Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith, transposed from Victorian Britain to 1930s Korea under Japanese occupation. That relocation isn’t just aesthetic - it adds layers of ethnic hierarchy, colonial power dynamics, and cultural erasure that weren’t in the original text. Going in, I didn’t know much about the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Coming out, I understood more - about the period, about colonial identity, about how Park Chan-wook and co-writer Chung Seo-kyung mapped Victorian class oppression onto something even more fraught. This is a film that expanded my worldview in the best way. The performances are extraordinary. At every reveal, I had totally bought into what I was meant to believe - and then seeing the flip side of the truth played out alongside the same scenes, I was stunned by how completely I’d been played. Throughout the film, I was left wondering about every character’s true intentions, second-guessing everything. Kim Tae-ri was selected from 1,500 auditions, and this being her first performance makes it even more remarkable - it’s a nakedly vulnerable, literally naked, genuinely brave debut. Kim Min-hee transforms across the three parts in ways that reframe everything you thought you understood about Hideko. And the men are playing absolute monsters. What a risky commitment from everyone involved. Books function as both prison and escape. Hideko has been trained to read pornography aloud - her literacy weaponized against her, turned into a tool of her own captivity. But she and Sook-hee also use storytelling to plot their freedom. The same tool of oppression becomes liberation when women control it. The set design is incredible. The mansion was filmed at Rokkaen in Kuwana, Japan - a real 1913 estate designed by British architect Josiah Conder that combines Japanese and Western architecture. Production designer Ryu Seong-hie won the Vulcain Award at Cannes for her work. Park himself said the library is the most important space: Japanese architecture on the exterior, Western library inside, with tatami mats at the center that transform into a Japanese garden during the pornographic readings. Japanese gardens reproduce the world in miniature - Kouzuki creating a kingdom inside his kingdom. The sex scenes have been heavily discussed, and I understand why - any film with explicit lesbian sex directed by a man will get side eye. But it makes sense that a woman who is literally a virgin, raised and forced to read pornography her whole life, would go absolutely feral and perform for the male gaze during her first sexual experience. That’s what she’s been trained to do. The film knows this. It’s such a shame Hollywood stopped making erotic thrillers. The genre is essentially dead in American cinema, and the only way to get my fix is through foreign film. Thank god Korea - and Park Chan-wook specifically - never abandoned ship. This is Park’s magnum opus. Perfectly executed. It competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and won Best Film Not in the English Language at BAFTA. And yet, in thirty-four years of directing, Park Chan-wook has never received an Oscar nomination. The Academy overlooked Oldboy, passed on this, shut out Decision to Leave even after it won Best Director at Cannes. In a post-Parasite world, you’d think the door was open. Bong walked through. Park keeps getting left outside. But forget the awards. What stays with me is the ending. This is one of the rare movies where queer women find peace. So often in film, women who embrace pleasure or queerness are punished - someone dies, someone pays penance, the joy gets taken back. The Handmaiden refuses that. These women escape to Shanghai. They find happiness. They embrace pleasure and each other and they get to keep it. The only other film I can think of that does this is Bound by the Wachowski sisters. It’s so rare it feels revolutionary. At its core, this is a movie about the prisons men build for women - societally and domestically - and the beauty of people brave enough to escape. Seeing queer stories about women helps me empathize better and understand the power I hold as a man. Watching toxic masculinity and control depicted this clearly - Kouzuki’s ownership, the Count’s manipulation - is a little scary. I can see those patterns. I can recognize them. That recognition is valuable. Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/the-handmaiden/) ## Works on My Machine Get the next post by email. My newsletter covers homelab builds, AI tools and open source, and it goes out when I have something to say. It's free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. You'll get an email to confirm first. ![Joe Karlsson at his desk, chin on hand, with a microphone in front of him](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/about/collage/studio.webp) Joe Karlsson I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side. [More about me →](https://www.joekarlsson.com/about/) [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/joekarlsson.com) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekarlsson/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/JoeKarlsson)