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User Reviews for: The Handmaiden

CinemaSerf
/10  one year ago
Talk about the best laid plans! This is a cracking, sexy, thriller set in Korea during the Japanese occupation of the 1930s. It centres around the charming, butter-wouldn't-melt "Sook-Hee" (Tae Ri Kim) who takes a job attending the wealthy "Lady Hideko" (Kim Min-hee). She lives on a grand estate with her cantankerous uncle "Kouzuki" (Cho Jin-woong) and is frankly rather low maintenance for her new maid. Pretty quickly, though, we begin to smell a rat! Is she what she seems, and what has the obviously duplicitous "Count" (Ha Jung-woo) got to do with things? Well gradually, we find out that there are schemes afoot to rob the lady of her fortune, her liberty - even her mind. What the plotting didn't take account for, though, was human nature. A bond gradually starts to build between the two women, a bond of friendship, of trust - of love! What happens next...? This benefits hugely from having a tightly-knit cast who work well together; a solid and intriguing story that marries the Machiavelian with the mischievous, the sexy with the sordid - and, it looks great too. The characters vacillate from being likeable, kinky, and often pretty loathsome in equal measure, but somehow there is always a sense that right will be done! I loved the ending, and the performances from the two women are engaging and captivating. Some of it isn't for the squeamish, but it flew by, is expertly crafted, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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