Spurred to filmmaking by a seminal viewing of Vertigo (referenced visually in The Handmaiden), he remains in thrall to the style of Hitchcock, whose ravishing perviness was so flagrant that the revelation of his sadistic treatment of the actress Tippi Hedren and others was one of the biggest nonsurprises in the history of Hollywood scandals. The primal scene of his most famous movie, Oldboy (winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2003), an act of voyeurism that sets the preposterously convoluted plot in motion, features a young girl who, holding up a mirror to view herself engaged in an illicit act, spots the title character spying on her. His characters are forever peering through peepholes at forbidden truths and musing over reflections. Like many directors, he is infatuated with gazes, male and otherwise. On the other hand, Park is a card-carrying member of the party of the eye. Park gets this: Not only has he kept the hand reference in the title, but some of the crueler punishments in the film (notably less violent than his usual stuff) are meted out to fingers. In Waters’ novel, the hand that works and caresses opposes the eye that mercilessly scrutinizes and the word that commands. But like the water in those reflecting pools, both are fundamentally unpredictable and unruly, always trying to overflow and slip away from under their would-be masters. Women and their sexual desires, for the men in this film, are forces to be constrained, controlled, and collected. In such a room, one of the two central characters in The Handmaiden, an heiress (Kim Min-hee) confined to a mansion in 1930s Japan, is made to dress in elaborate traditional clothes and read aloud from her uncle’s vast pornography collection to his creepy friends. Several of Park’s bad guys keep small, square, decorative pools of it under floor panels in their fancy houses, sliding back the panels to display their tame water to guests. It can act as a mirror, reflecting yourself back at you, but only when relegated to a condition of stasis. Water, after all, has long served as Park’s emblem for the maddening fluidity of images and desire.

Only a cosmic Freudian could have cooked up the fact that Park Chan-wook’s new film, The Handmaiden, is based on a book by the Welsh novelist Sarah Waters.

Sara waters fingersmith