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First Reviews for Chan Wook's 'The Handmaiden' adaption

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Oersted

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tumblr_o5w0jeyCWx1u8xut2o7_540.jpg


Here is a trailer:

http://youtu.be/wKpZLtt4Ctg

Synopsis

Set in the 1930's in South Korea and Japan. Story revolves around 4 people: a noble lady (Kim Min-Hee) who has inherited a fortune, a swindler count (Ha Jung-Woo) who is after the noble lady’s fortune, a young female pickpocket (Kim Tae-Ri) hired by the swindler count and the noble lady’s uncle (Cho Jin-Woong) who is her guardian.

Reviews

Boasting more tangled plots and bodies than an octopus has tentacles, South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden” is a bodice-ripper about a pickpocket who poses as a maid to swindle a sequestered heiress. His first Korean-language fiction feature since 2009’s “Thirst,” it’s sybaritic, cruel and luridly mesmerizing.

http://variety.com/2016/film/reviews/the-handmaiden-review-1201774313/

Expectations are fully met in Park Chan-wook’s exquisitely filmed The Handmaiden (Agassi), an amusingly kinky erotic thriller and love story that brims with delicious surprises, making its two-and-a-half hours fly by. Though spiced up with nudity and verbal perversions for adult audiences, it never descends into the cheap and tawdry, and violence, considering this is from the cult director of Oldboy, remains surprisingly off-screen.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/handmaiden-agassi-cannes-review-894027

Exquisitely designed and sexually liberating, this is a hugely entertaining thriller that has shades of Gaslight, Les Diaboliques and last year’s Duke of Burgundy, but thankfully no grey.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/201...lesbian-potboiler-simmers-with-sexual-tension

Kouzuki could also be taken for a kind of Park surrogate: His desperate attempts to wring orgiastic pleasure from the pain that's inflicted on others, especially toward the end, could be read as the filmmaker's sly self-critique of his own indulgences in hollow exploitation. This makes sense in a film that generally trades physical for emotional violence, and that recognizes the extent of the latter's psychological repercussions. This acknowledgment also makes The Handmaiden modestly feminist, even if its elegant, Lust, Caution-worthy NC-17 sex never quite fully escapes the feeling of the very exploitation that it's supposed to represent a rejection of.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/cannes-film-review-the-handmaiden


Please note that normally I just post the last paragraph, because usually it contains the conclusions of the review. This time it varies, due to lack of said conclusions in the last paragraph.

As usual, lock if old
 

k1t4j

Member
Looks fantastic, and having thoroughly enjoyed his other movies I am sure I will not be disappointed.
 

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Damn its been a while since his last Korean Language film but I'm in. If nothing else one can say this guy does not make typical by the numbers movies and they are usually as captivating as they are cruel. Love his work.
 
"explicit lesbian sex scene with the score from the Thin Red Line playing in the background"

had curiosity, now attention, django reference, etc
 

Lime

Member
One review said that the less you know going into the film, the better. I would suggest avoiding reading too much about it before you go see it.
 

Laieon

Member
Can't wait. Can't find anything online about when it comes out in Korea, oddly enough. I'm living here, so it would be nice if it was sooner rather than later.
 
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