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The Handmaiden

Ah-ga-ssi (The Handmaiden)

2016

Park Chan-wook

Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong ...

7.6

17,337

Thriller. Drama. Romance 1930s Korea, in the period of Japanese occupation, a new girl is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress who lives a secluded life on a large countryside estate with her domineering Uncle. But the maid has a secret. She is a pickpocket recruited by a swindler posing as a Japanese Count to help him seduce the Lady to elope with him, rob her of her fortune, and lock her up in a madhouse. The plan seems to proceed according to plan ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Maggie Lee Variety	"Clever, heady and sensually lavish to a fault. (...) [Park Chan-wook] slides back into his own febrile cinematic universe of eroticized torture and misogyny"	POS
United Kingdom	Benjamin Lee The Guardian	"Gorgeous, beautifully composed direction and committed performers (...) Exquisitely designed and sexually liberating, this is a hugely entertaining thriller (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Deborah Young The Hollywood Reporter	"All the best things about Asian cinema, rolled into one (...) An amusingly kinky erotic thriller and love story that brims with delicious surprises"	POS
United States	Manohla Dargis The New York Times	"The art of the tease is rarely as refined as in "'The Handmaiden'."	POS
United States	Steve Pond The Wrap	"Over nearly two and a half hours, 'The Handmaiden' grows tiresome — beautiful and occasionally startling, but tiresome (...) Still, the director is nothing if not a world-class auteur with a distinctive vision"	NEU
United States	Matt Zoller Seitz rogerebert.com	"It is voluptuously beautiful, frankly sexual, occasionally perverse and horrifically violent (...) This is a film made by an artist at the peak of his powers (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United Kingdom	Andrew Lowry Empire	"'The Handmaiden' is at once a superlative thriller and a deeply erotic character study, but it’s the intelligence, mordant wit and depth of characterisation that are the real turn-ons (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Anthony Lane The New Yorker	"Park has conjured up not only his smartest but also his most stirring film to date."	POS

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