The Handmaiden (2016)

A horny Korean Rashomon filled with M. Nighty twisteroos, taking place in early 20th century Japanese-occupied-Korea. A story in three parts, each part overlapping, and each part retelling the overlap from a different, and more correct, perspective.

It centers around a poor Korean girl sent to work as the handmaiden of a rich young Japanese woman with a massive inheritance. But it's all a setup: the handmaiden is actually working with the Korean con-artist who is wooing the Japanese woman in an attempt to marry her and steal her fortune.

The handmaiden and con-man have to work in secret to manipulate the heiress, both helped and hindered by the fact that she is already betrothed to her abusive uncle who runs a kinky erotic book reading club for wealthy perverts in the basement. At the same time, the handmaiden grows to care for the heiress, and questions start to arise about whether she is still in it for the big score.

But all is not as it seems, and there's a double-crossing. Then a triple-crossing. Maybe even a quadruple-crossing. Everybody gets numerically-crossed, and the cool pornographic scrolls don't fare well.

The uncle, at first a rather unimportant background character, briskly grows to horrifying importance as the shallow deceptions fall away and the real characters are revealed. His perverted Japanese stereotypes are presented with magnificent dramatic flair.

Park Chan-wook has a real knack for making otherwise hum-drum scenes compellingly uncomfortable. During a bathing scene, the handmaiden calmly files down the heiress's tooth using a thimble on her finger, in a manner that is simultaneously casual, erotic, and grotesque.

The Rashomon framing is often the end in and of itself; a simple story presented three ways, where the minor differences of the triplet are the intrigue. And that's certainly the expectation here, with the relatively straightforward narrative of part one. But Chan-wook doesn't rest on the triptych to entertain by itself, but uses it to hold back the rising waters until he's ready to release the wave of insanity. It's starts in a dramatic war-time period-piece romance, and ends in a violent mad scientist tentacle porn.