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Nine years after Thirst, director PARK Chan-wook returns both to Korean filmmaking and the Cannes Competition lineup with The Handmaiden, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ erotic thriller Fingersmith which swaps out Victorian Era England for 1930s Korea and Japan during the Colonial Era. Director PARK and stars KIM Tae-ri, KIM Min-hee, HA Jung-woo and CHO Jin-woong walked the red carpet of the Palais ahead of the film’s Cannes bow on Saturday May 14th.

 

Following his Grand Prize and Jury Prize wins at Cannes with Old Boy (2003) and Thirst, PARK’s hotly anticipated new film drew plenty of attention from critics the moment it debuted on the Croisette, who mostly gave the film top marks.

 

Though the film takes some liberties with the original text, as the director has done in the past for Old Boy (based on a Japanese manga) and Thirst (loosely adapted from Emile Zola’s novel Therese Raquin), Screen Daily opined that “the film manages the tricky feat of both staying true to Waters breathless, page-turning prose, and creating a wholly persuasive new milieu for the story.” Meanwhile, Variety felt that PARK “slides back into his own febrile cinematic universe of eroticized torture and misogyny, rather submerging Waters’ theme of female rebellion and liberation.”

 

Reviews all referred to the film’s eroticism with The Guardian pointing out the film’s inclusion of “explicit sex but more importantly, there’s longing, affection and intimacy between the maid, impressive newcomer KIM Tae-ri, and her sexually inexperienced heiress, a layered turn from KIM Min-hee.” Sight and Sound also received praise for newcomer KIM Tae-ri, writing that she “seems to have the strongest feel for the tone of the film – her performance is by turns funny, sexy and of a piece with the heightened atmosphere.”

 

The Hollywood Reporter was also taken by PARK’s latest, calling it an “amusingly kinky erotic thriller and love story that brims with delicious surprises, making its two-and-a-half hours fly by.”