This deliberately mischievous mix and each act’s limberly acrobatic flip ensures The Handmaiden keeps a tight grip on our attentions. Magnificent performances all round ensure our eye is pulled not just by their flesh, but also by their knotty intentions.

| Dec 20, 2024

The performances, the score, the craftsmanship, it’s all impeccable...

| Aug 8, 2024

Fiercely intelligent, unapologetically erotic and endlessly stylish, The Handmaiden is a perfect film that toys with the audience’s expectations and formed beliefs.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 30, 2024

Park Chan-wook’s neurotic period piece is a beyond tricky weaving of conflicting identity, the desire for intimacy, masculinity vs. femininity, and historical and cultural oppression.

| Jun 18, 2024

Park demonstrates how the complicated relationship between role-play, desire, secrecy, power and revenge prove ripe for darkly comic (and perverse) fodder.

| Dec 12, 2023

Beautiful images in the frame with a grotesc story about the survival in a context war. You have to watch it. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 31, 2022

It’s a beautiful film of quality and cleverness.

| May 19, 2022

Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden envelops the viewer in a clever con game of psychological duplicity, depraved predators, dark humor, and sordid sexual delights.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 9, 2022

While its a feat of technical brilliance and visual genius, its the way Park uses his story to force his audience to question their assumptions that made me speechless the first time I saw it.

| Feb 21, 2022

The Handmaiden is a remarkably progressive film that, despite using and abusing sex for the most part, refuses to objectify its subjects.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 2, 2021

Through the extremity of the story, Park manages to present a number of social messages, once more

| Apr 11, 2021

Whether you've seen it before or not, now's as perfect time as any to see what all the fuss is about while [director director Park Chan-Wook] begins filming his upcoming his romantic murder mystery Decision to Leave this year.

| Feb 25, 2021

The drama combines the sumptuous art direction and black humor of Park's past work with a warmth and compassion that feeds the soul.

| Feb 11, 2021

A complicated revenge story, ripe with detail and secrets.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 3, 2021

The Handmaiden is an epic illustration that there is perhaps nothing more human than inhumanity.

| Jan 4, 2021

The twists in The Handmaiden come fast and furious. It's an engrossing tale that will constantly have you guessing which direction the narrative is headed.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 30, 2020

Plenty of humor and an incomparably depraved, unyielding, violent, rebellious level of creativity.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 5, 2020

...the love between the two lead women is what drives this film.

| Nov 16, 2020

Throbbing with greed and passion, deception and betrayal, the story remains every bit as gripping on screen as it was on the page.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 16, 2020

A rapturously seductive slow burn watch.

| Oct 13, 2020