The Handmaiden

Utterly spellbinding and rewardingly multifaceted, The Handmaiden offers an encyclopedia of masterful filmmaking and screenwriting techniques. Park’s deftness is constantly innovative but always essential to the plot. It’s seen in the use of mirrors to simultaneously communicate power dynamics while eliminating the need for cuts in during a confrontational conversation and thus ramping up tension to eleven. His direction is more so scintillating in the triptych perspectives from which the film evolves in a deliciously pairing of black comedy and unhinged tragedy. The really mindboggling part is how the story never loses its explosive momentum for nearly 3 hours while remaining incredibly thematically dense. It’s at once an intimate tale of how trauma informs our fantasies and a sprawling critique of imperialist Japan preceding WWII. No matter what lens you look at it through, whether you’re compelled by the constant narrative acrobatics or the scintillating visual language, it simply doesn’t get better than this.