With his latest and hugely popular film The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook reaffirmed his status as one of contemporary Korean cinema’s great auteurs and daring stylists. The Handmaiden is a lush and lavish adaptation of the Welsh historical crime novel Fingersmith that transposes the book’s Victorian setting to Korea during the brutal thirty-five-year Japanese colonial rule that began in 1910. Park’s film also channels the novel’s dark eroticism into a psychosexually intense and fascinating allegory of abusive class hierarchy and authoritarian repression. Hong Sang-soo regular Kim Min-hee stars as the elusive daughter of a wealthy bookdealer whose fortunes are targeted by a cunning conman with dark designs to seduce and marry the young woman and commit her to an asylum. Matching wits with the rakish Don Juan is his assistant, an equally crafty pickpocket disguised as the young woman’s maid who sets into motion a shifting triangle of desire that gradually locks the three into a strange and unsettling showdown.