Review: ‘Handmaiden’ a fever dream from South Korea’s Park

“The Handmaiden”

(Not rated. 144 minutes.)

*** 1/2

In Japanese and Korean with English subtitles

“The Handmaiden” is a fever dream from South Korean virtuoso Park Chan-wook, bursting with the kind of goodies that send cinephiles into ecstasy. It’s an intricate thriller about a con game, but so loaded with wicked humor and sensual appeal — ravishing cinematography, high-temperature eroticism — that for long stretches viewers might forget there’s any plot at all.

Park made his name internationally in the 2000s with three films that came to be known as the Vengeance Trilogy, including cult favorite “Oldboy.” He’s an aesthete whose work can be extremely violent and reveals an undisguised attraction to the perverse and the plain weird. (There’s a celebrated scene in “Oldboy” in which an octopus is eaten, and I’ll withhold the details.)

The filmmaker based “The Handmaiden” on Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel “Fingersmiths,” transposing the story from Victorian England to early-20th-century Korea during the Japanese occupation.

Soonhee (Kim Tae-ree), a young member of a criminal gang, is sent to work as a handmaiden at the mansion of the Japanese heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee). Soonhee’s real job is to pave the way for the gang’s chief, the Count (Ha Jung-woo), a handsome forger and con man who aims to marry Hideko and make off with her fortune.

Hideko is a hothouse flower completely under the thumb of her Korean uncle (Cho Jin-woong), an arrogant voluptuary who forces her to read Sadean pornography for the pleasure of his aristocratic pals. It would be wrong to give away much more of the plot, except for the major point, established early, that the handmaiden unexpectedly falls in love with her mistress, with very steamy results.

The novel’s theme of class warfare gets an extra twist here as it is complicated by the gulf between the Japanese and Korean characters. In fact, Park is so insistent that we bear in mind this historical antagonism that the movie provides different colors of English subtitles for the Korean and Japanese dialogue — though some subtleties, of course, will be lost on non-native speakers.

Between the eroticism and the luscious visual textures throughout, the director essentially puts the audience in the position of the sybarites who pant over Hideko’s readings. But the question arises: Park has created a Neverland, with a full share of witty surprises, but is it anything more?

In the end “The Handmaiden” registers as a glorious vision that’s been inflated — with wonderfully perfumed air, but still inflated — beyond its limits. It runs a luxurious 144 minutes. Has Park succumbed to the self-indulgence that’s among the film’s themes?

Then again, I’m also open to another argument: With an experience this exquisite, who cares?