On the anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender and the end of colonial rule in Korea, we examine how Park Chan-wook folds political critique into the visual pleasures of his erotic thriller.
A decade since South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s slick lesbian thriller The Handmaiden premiered at Cannes, its smouldering allure shows no signs of extinguishing. In 2026, the film continues to electrify its way through sapphic film clubs and pride month screenings, even being curated by Emerald Fennell as part of her “Love Stories” programme at the BFI IMAX – it’s not hard to see why. Witnessing Korean pickpocket Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) and Japanese lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) fuck over the men in their way and fuck each other instead is an intoxicating ride. But there is a lot more to this elaborate puzzle of a film than meets the eye. As it turns ten, Korea celebrates 81 years of liberation from Japanese colonial rule, brought about by the formal surrender of Japan in WWII on 2 September 1945. Set in 1930s Korea under occupation, The Handmaiden folds sly political critique into its baroque designs and rigorous compositions.
On its surface, The Handmaiden is a nail-bitingly tense tale of subterfuge. The film opens with Sook-hee conspiring with Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), to act as a handmaiden to the wealthy heiress Hideko in a plot to swindle her out of her fortune. Infiltrating her manor, they must sneak past Hideko’s tyrannical uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), who plans to marry Hideko to keep her treasures for himself. But Hideko is not the guileless victim she first appears to be, and Sook-hee soon finds herself under her mistress’s spell (and her body). The quartet’s intimate entanglements enact a sharp commentary of colonial relations and its paradoxes.
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The colonial era (1910−1945) was a time of great suffering and humiliation for Koreans, the wounds of which still sting in post-colonial memory. The representation of this period in mainstream South Korean cinema has mostly been relegated to bombastic action flicks that pit Korean resistance fighters against Japanese soldiers, rousing nationalist fervour for box office profit. Films such as Assassination (2015) construct a manichean world of heroes and villains against backdrops of lavish department stores and steam-belching trains, boasting spectacles of Korea’s burgeoning modernity. Curiously, they refuse to acknowledge its colonial origins.
The Handmaiden is guilty of indulging in the same penchant for extravagant sets, but it shows that aesthetics are never innocent. The house where Sook-hee arrives to work as a handmaiden is an English manor jarringly sutured to a Japanese wing – a Frankenstein’s monster of architectural styles. It is soon revealed that the estate’s owner, Kouzuki, made his fortune by collaborating with the colonial government. The chimeric, grotesque design mirrors his perverse admiration for Japan and Britain: two imperial powers commanding vast empires at the time. While the film revels in the mansion’s opulence, snaking through labyrinthine corridors and vertiginous staircases, it reminds us that the violence of colonialism always lurks in its shadows.
Rather than flattening the history of occupation into a fight of good versus evil, The Handmaiden basks in its contradictions. Koreans were forced to speak Japanese and adopt Japanese names and customs, but the imperial order still sought to maintain a clear difference between the ethnicities, designating Koreans as an underclass in their own country. Yet, the intimate proximity of the two cultures irrevocably blurred their boundaries. Ambitious grifters such as Kouzuki – originally Korean – could move up in the world by rubbing shoulders with the Japanese, going so far as to embody the enemy completely. Having cast aside his Korean wife to wed a Japanese aristocrat (Hideko’s aunt), he takes her name, dons a kimono, and LARPs as Japanese.
Kouzuki is not the only one. Count Fujiwara is in fact a Korean conman, and the ease with which he passes as Japanese nobility unsettles the concept of a coherent ethnic identity. The lack of perceivable difference between the Japanese colonisers and the colonised Koreans engenders an uneasy ambiguity where it’s hard to tell friend from foe. By successfully mimicking the colonisers, it becomes evident that their superiority isn’t as inherent as they’d want you to believe. That the only real Japanese character, Hideko, is played by South Korean actress Kim Min-hee, adds an extra-diegetic layer of mockery.
“Dressed up, you look like a lady too,” Hideko tells Sook-hee in a scintillating makeover scene, where Sook-hee trades her modest hanbok for Hideko’s Western finery. As Hideko turns Sook-hee around to unbutton her corset, the camera leans in and tightly frames their heads from behind, the two practically indistinguishable. The doubling of the women foreshadows the identity-swapping ploy to come, but it also exposes an anxious myth: the essential difference between lady and handmaiden, between Japan and Korea.
This is made even more apparent when their clothes come off. A chorus of gasps and moans build to a crescendo as the pair clasp hands and scissor vigorously, the writhing figures composed as mirror images of each other. At first glance, the entwined bodies of a Japanese lady and her Korean servant seem to serve as an apt metaphor for colonial intimacy, an acknowledgement of the fraught cultural and economic exchange between the two countries. But the passion and duration of the scene far exceed symbolism. In this unabashedly gaudy tableau of lesbian ecstasy, the anticipated violence between coloniser and colonised is usurped by rapturous sensuality.
Park built his international reputation on the violent delights of his Vengeance Trilogy, the vigilante protagonists of which single-mindedly devote themselves to revenge, only to be overcome by a sense of futility after the act. In The Handmaiden, love and sex are pursued with just as much fervour, but the outcome is far more transformative. On a narrative level, Hideko and Sook-hee’s desire for each other catalyses their mutual liberation, as they escape from their oppressive circumstances and sail towards a future together. On a deeper level, their passionate embrace subverts tired nationalistic binaries, shattering the taboo of depicting affinity between Japan and Korea with loudly unapologetic lesbian sex.
The film’s divisive sex scenes have been much maligned for their gratuitous endorsement of the ‘male gaze’, but is it not precisely this voyeuristic excess that we watch it for? From the decadent costumes to the feverish moaning, there is hardly anything modest about it. And if the film’s enduring popularity among lesbians tells us anything, it’s that women can be scopophiles, too.
What is remarkable about The Handmaiden is how stealthily it smuggles critique into its visual pleasures. At once a resplendent queer love story and a subtle examination of colonialism, every rewatch of its sumptuous staging invites us to notice even more delicious details and knotty complexities.
