Women and Queerness in Horror: The Handmaiden

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Handmaiden, discussions of adult themes, and mentions of abuse, child sexual abuse, suicide, sexual assault and harassment.

Having recovered my brain from last week’s need for a mental and emotional break, I have now jumped to the hard opposite with a movie I have wanted to watch for a long time: Park Chan-wook and Chung Seo-kyung’s The Handmaiden (2016). This film is not to be confused with The Handmaid’s Tale. Though these two works both touch on themes of patriarchal subjugation and the ways in which women contest it. They are very different, and the number of times I came across a mish-mashed “The Handmaiden’s Tale” while researching for this article is a little embarrassing.

It could be said that The Handmaiden is perhaps less strictly a horror movie and more of a thriller, alternately described as psychological or erotic depending who you ask. I’m inclined to query those descriptors, and I will later on. For now, suffice it to say The Handmaiden pulls on enough horror elements and threads — and more than enough queerness — to merit a place in this series.

Discussing The Handmaiden requires a rundown of its historical and political context, particularly as the film does not hold your hand or give you conveniently placed title cards. Currents of political and national identity permeate the film, creating a narrative that is very tied to time and place. However, these elements are primarily the backdrop on which it’s implicitly played out, rather than being discussed in exhaustive detail out loud. There were a lot of story beats that made more sense to me having read up on the context beforehand.

The Handmaiden takes its inspirations from Fingersmith’s story by Sarah Waters, which is set in Victorian-era Britain. It follows follows an orphaned thief, Sue Trinder, who is enlisted to help carry out a heist against a Victorian-era wealthy heiress, Maud Lilly. This heist would take place through encouraging her to marry a con-man who would then commit her to a mental institution and claim her fortune for himself. However, Sue and Maud gradually fall in love, and through a series of convoluted double (and triple) crosses as well as a hefty dose of trauma, they are ultimately able to escape their circumstances and find a way to be together.

Full disclosure: I have not yet read Fingersmith. I wanted to enter this movie without preconceived notions or expectations, and I didn’t want this article to just be me cross-referencing its relationship with the book. That has been done by people more informed than me.

The film translates the setting and context to 1930s Korea, during the period typically described by South Koreans as the Japanese forced occupation, which lasted officially from 1910 to 1945. To sketch the trajectory of this period, we should first look to late 1875 and early 1876, at which time Korea’s status as a protectorate of China came to an end. That placed Korea under the beginnings of Japanese sway, through the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876.

The treaty was designed to open up Korea to Japanese trade following a period of isolationism. It has been posited that Japan framed this treaty in order to “beat Europe to the punch,” so to speak, in opening up similar trade relationships. In practice, this was an unequal treaty signed under duress in the wake of an armed clash between Korea and Japan in September 1875 known as the Ganghwa Island incident. The treaty, in addition to ending Korea’s protectorate status under China, forced open three Korean ports to Japanese trade and granted extraterritorial rights to Japanese citizens. Because of this, Japanese citizens living in or visiting Korea would be exempted from Korean legal jurisdiction.

Though the outcomes of the 1876 treaty were met with anti-Japanese opposition and resistance from native Koreans, these contestations were summarily (and usually violently) put down and quelled. Over time, this increasingly aided the solidification of Japanese power over Korea. Between 1884 and 1894, Japan continued an increasingly aggressive expansion into the Korean economy, until the outbreak of the Donghak peasant revolution in 1894. Said revolution was taken as a pretext for direct military intervention by Japan in Korean affairs.

The Korean government’s request for Chinese assistance here was taken by Japan as a violation of the Convention of Tsientsin, which had been signed between Japan and China in 1885 and was intended to make Joseon Korea a co-protectorate of both China and Japan. Thus, Chinese and Japanese forces clashed in Incheon, Korea, on the 3rd of May 1894, incurring the First Sino-Japanese War. Japan emerged victorious in April 1895.

Concurrently, China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki in the same year. This treaty recognized “the full and complete independence and autonomy of Korea,” thus ending Korea’s long-standing relationship with the Chinese Qing dynasty. At the same time, Japan suppressed the Donghak peasant revolution with Korean government forces, leading to a difficult situation. Though Korea was officially independent from both China and Japan, Japan was still a significant military power within Korea, vying only with Russia for predominance.

Ultimately, Japan was able to secure both economic and military dominance in Korea by October 1904. By September 1905, Japan had won the Russo-Japanese War, thus eliminating Japan’s last rival to influence in Korea. Two months later, Korea was obliged to become a Japanese protectorate by the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1905. The Japan-Korea Treaty of 1910 finalized Japanese control over Korea through annexation, with the treaty postulating that “His Majesty the Emperor of Korea concedes completely and definitely his entire sovereignty over the whole Korean territory to His Majesty the Emperor of Japan.”

From then on, Japan was able to control many aspects of Korean media, law, and governmental practice, as well as aggressively expanding Japanese land ownership in Korea. Many former Korean landowners, as well as agricultural workers, then became tenant farmers. They lost their entitlements almost overnight because they could not pay for the land reclamation and irrigation improvements forced on them by Japanese landowners.

By 1932, an estimated 52.7% of all arable land in Korea had come under Japanese control, showing a rapid growth from the 7 to 8% that was Japanese-owned in 1910. Many of these Korean tenant farmers had to pay over half their crop as rent to the Japanese landlords. That sent many Korean farmers into intense financial vulnerability, such that many families had to send their wives and daughters into factories or into coerced sex work to be able to pay their taxes.

Japan also expanded its influence over cultural institutions during the annexation. Newspapers in circulation were of Japanese origin, with local Korean newspapers being barred from publication. Additionally, efforts intensified to culturally assimilate Koreans through education and literature. Though the Korean government strengthened efforts from 1921 onward to promote Korean media and literature throughout Korea, the Japanese government created further incentives to educate Korean children in Japanese.

This resulted in rooting the sensibility dissected in The Handmaiden wherein Japanese was considered a “superior” or “higher-class” language as opposed to the “lower-class” Korean. Relatedly, by the time Japan formally annexed Korea in 1910, a portion of Koreans had already registered themselves with Japanese-style names. Shortly afterward, a new ordinance was issued in 1911. Order No. 124, barred any future registrations of Koreans under Japanese names and required Koreans who had registered Japanese-style names to revert to their original names.

However, we can still see this trend reverberating through The Handmaiden, with Sook-hee being informally “given” a Japanese-style name, Tamako, upon her arrival at the manor. This is also evident in the backstory of the character of Uncle Kouzuki. He is a Korean by birth who became a naturalized Japanese citizen, working to be recognized as a Japanese man of letters, and aiming to marry his Japanese niece Hideko. Park Chan-wook explains his character using the Korean term sadaejuui, which refers to an individual who internalizes the violence of a colonial power and becomes quote-unquote voluntarily subservient to it. Such individuals pose a “big threat and a serious danger for the other people of their nation,” which is precisely what Uncle Kouzuki represents in the film. Now that we have this background established, we can dive into looking at The Handmaiden proper.

After some early shots depicting the presence of a Japanese military force patrolling through a Korean village, we then see one of our deuteragonists, Sook-hee, bidding farewell to her tearful family as she prepares to leave for the manor in which our other lead, Hideko, resides. There, she will serve as Hideko’s personal maid. She is briskly swept into the manor, introducing herself under the pseudonym Ok Ju, for reasons that are as-yet unclear to us. She reacts with appropriate reactions, quietly gasping in awe at the wealth and splendor of the manor. In a nod to both the original book and the relationship between Japan and Western ideas of “modernization,” the manor is constructed half in Japanese and half in British style.

Sook-hee’s introduction to the manor is speckled with physical comedy and clumsiness. This serves both to draw the audience into investing in her, and codes her as an “outsider” in a wealthy Japanese house. Visibly nervous and overwhelmed, Sook-hee nonetheless accepts her new role, settling into her narrow sleeping area right outside Hideko’s room. Hideko wakes screaming from a nightmare about her aunt’s ghost, drawing Sook-hee into the room to comfort and assure her. Though initially mistaken for the previous maid, who had been fired, Sook-hee manages to eventually quiet Hideko, and settles into bed next to her. Sook-hee soothes her back to sleep while being briefly entranced by the way Hideko smells, in what is but the first of many seemingly tender gestures between the two women.

The narrative then jumps backwards to reveal what is also the first of several instances of deceit in the film, as well as introducing Sook-hee’s internal monologue through the subtitles. We learn that she comes from an impoverished family who were forced to send her away as a child to be put to work for a silversmith. In being raised there, she also learned some skills in the vein of petty thievery and pickpocketing. Equally central to this moment is the reveal that the family for which she works has been “adopting” Korean children abandoned by families too impoverished to raise them. This family is effectively selling them to Japan in order for these children to enter the Japanese nobility.

We then meet a character we will refer to henceforth as Count Fujiwara. He is, a con man, who has set his sights on the wealthy heiress Hideko. He is planning to seduce her, marry her, then commit her to a psychiatric institution in order to steal her fortune.

As he explains this plan to the women and girls present, we also learn of Kouzuki, Hideko’s uncle. As previously mentioned, Kouzuki is a naturalized Japanese citizen born in Korea who has chased his aspirations of being recognized and accepted in Japanese society to the point of becoming a translator. Furthermore, he has been helping Japanese government officials carry out the seizure of control over Korea, in exchange for a huge sum of money.

Kouzuki then married a Japanese woman and took on her surname, essentially becoming fully assimilated into Japanese culture. Afterward he used his new-found wealth to obsessively accumulate rare books, as well as seeking to gain more wealth through selling forgeries. In addition, as Kouzuki’s first wife has passed away, he intends to marry his niece, Hideko, to gain access to her fortune and secure once again his position in Japanese society.

Fujiwara intends to thwart that effort by marrying Hideko himself, while also planting Sook-hee in the house as Hideko’s personal maid. Her job is to gain Hideko’s trust and encourage her to marry Fujiwara, once he makes his proposal. In exchange Sook-hee will receive a generous cut of Hideko’s fortune as well as her clothes and jewelry once Hideko is institutionalized.

Moving forward, we see Sook-hee proceed to a job interview with Hideko, bearing a forged reference letter from a non-existent former mistress. She presents this to Hideko, carefully performing a deliberate act as a giggly, naive “country maid.” Hideko claims a headache and insists that Sook-hee read the letter to her.

Sook-hee attempts to cover for the fact that she is illiterate, and in the process we learn that Hideko is speaking Korean to Sook-hee, not Japanese, because “it’s a bother” and all the books her uncle makes her read are in Japanese. This sets up the thread for the trauma we later come to understand Hideko has been subjected to at her uncle’s hands. However, in this early stage of ignorance, it seems to speak only to the transgression of an expected social role, where Hideko speaks Korean to Sook-hee and Japanese to other characters.

What neither Sook-hee nor the audience realize at this point, is that this has been a test on Hideko’s part, to see for herself whether or not Sook-hee can read. This is a distinct turn of events that will become relevant later. Hideko then suddenly realizes she is expected for her “reading practice,” and Sook-hee quickly helps her dress before they part ways, to meet up again at noon.

After some exploration of the house and grounds — including rifling through Hideko’s belongings and trying on some of her clothes — Sook-hee realizes the time, and goes to fetch Hideko. She forgets to knock on the door, thus interrupting Hideko and her uncle. The scene ratchets sharply upward in tension for Sook-hee’s intrusion and her first encounter with Uncle Kouzuki, an immediately deeply unpleasant man. This tension isn’t so much resolved as replaced with a different kind, when the scene jumps to Sook-hee helping Hideko bathe in preparation for Count Fujiwara’s arrival.

It’s a sequence that, in some ways, treads familiar ground from period dramas. We see the drawing out the flower petals, the steamy closeness, the unspoken but very present give-and-take of control between servant and employer. Indeed, when Hideko complains of a sharp tooth that is hurting the inside of her mouth, this only intensifies as Sook-hee begins to file the tooth down, requiring her to wear a thimble and guide her finger inside Hideko’s mouth. It’s sensual, without question. The camera lingers. The air is full of steam from the tub. Sook-hee’s breath trembles, cheeks flushing, obvious code for a nervous, uninitiated desire even before her eyes start to move.

This scene is one of the first that was levied with critiques of the male gaze, but I’d like to offer a counter argument: the camera work here follows the lesbian gaze. Specifically, it follows Sook-hee’s gaze. Although Hideko and her actress are wholly nude, there is only one shot of Hideko’s breasts, and it’s specifically only after Sook-hee’s eyes trail to them. The rest of the shots linger on Sook-hee’s hands, on Sook-hee’s eyes, and on Sook-hee’s mouth.

They linger on the devastatingly tender trace of Hideko’s fingers at Sook-hee’s elbow. That gesture hit me in the gut the way Mr. Darcy’s (Matthew McFadyen) ungloved hand helping Elizabeth Bennett (Keira Knightley) out of the carriage seemingly hit straight people in 2005. Yes, it’s a seduction, and one that at least Sook-hee wasn’t expecting. It is a long scene, all things considered, and is almost agonizing by the time Sook-hee finally withdraws.

What it isn’t doing, at least from where I’m standing, is following these women’s bodies from a fetishistic lens. It is, rather expressing their sentiments and emotions through what their bodies are doing, which feels a great deal more natural than these criticisms seem to grasp. Dialogue isn’t required to make it work when we can see what the two women are feeling. While the scene absolutely exposes the idea of gaze, as the long lingering shots of Sook-hee’s eyes precisely demonstrate, it’s not a gaze that invites or includes men. We’re seeing Hideko through what Sook-hee is looking at. Calm down.

The next day, Fujiwara arrives, and briefly summons Sook-hee to meet with him alone. He checks in on her progress, during which Sook-hee dismisses his concerns, claiming that Hideko is naive and will be easily manipulated. Fujiwara reminds her of what she has been placed within the house to achieve, and leaves her with a gift to bring to Hideko. Said gift is a pair of earrings, with which Sook-hee complies and delivers.

Following dinner with Fujiwara and Hideko’s uncle, the two women retreat to wind down for the evening. What begins with Sook-hee helping Hideko undress devolves into a half-tender, half-comedic sequence of Hideko showing Sook-hee how it feels to wear a corset. That is, before dressing her up as a “lady,” demonstrating that Sook-hee could “pass” for one with the right clothes and makeup.

This serves as much as a commentary on the ways that these women are packaged and confined by the clothing they’re expected to wear — and the roles that accompany them — as it does open the door for a furtherance of the queered tension between them. The scene includes long, lingering shots of undoing buttons, loosening corsets, and brushed touches of gloved hands on skin for example. It’s significant, here, that putting clothes on comes with restraint and stifling, and taking them off makes room for the more honest desire and tenderness simmering under the surface. It’s equally significant that this scene goes beyond Sook-hee simply undressing Hideko. Hideko undresses Sook-hee in turn, creating a mirroring that is pivotal to the sexual as well as the emotional dynamics of this relationship.

Although the two women have yet to do anything explicitly sexual together, this is just a hint at the greater intent in the script. An intent to have the intimacy between Hideko and Sook-hee abandon hetero-patriarchal ideas of “who’s the man and who’s the woman,” to abandon the idea of “tops” and “bottoms,” as these aren’t conditions that apply. They’re equally making themselves and each other naked, touching each other’s skin, and watching each other for every response, shiver, and flinch. It matters. It makes a difference.

From then on, the movie continues for several minutes in a crackling near-silence, nearly completely devoid of dialogue but full of physical presence. Hideko and Sook-hee move around each other, not saying anything but always looking or being looked at. They are constantly aware of each other in the physical space of any given room. While I can understand how these sequences might have lost some people, I loved them.

The fraughtness of existing in such close quarters with a woman you’re developing feelings for but aren’t allowed to be with or touch (yet) only makes you more painfully aware of how close but far away she is. Much like the tooth-filing scene, carrying out this sensibility was more effective because it wasn’t spoken aloud, and didn’t need to be. Indeed, when Count Fujiwara finally deigns to enter and give Hideko her art lesson, the sudden loudness with which he opens the door almost operates like a jump scare. He is an intruding, masculine presence into a sequence that had previously been almost entirely void of men. He might as well have broken a window.

Even then, the camera shots are carefully framed. If Hideko and Fujiwara are conversing, the camera still holds Sook-hee in the background, watching them closely. If Hideko and Sook-hee exchange glances, Fujiwara is still in the shot. These filmic choices only serve to reinforce how much of an intrusive element Fujiwara is. The women continue not speaking to each other, hardly breathing, restricted in their own isolated bubbles until he leaves and they can exhale.

Or, at least, that’s the theory. Even once they are on their own, Sook-hee is clearly struggling. She wants to be closer, cupping Hideko’s face in her hands during a moment of emotional revelation. Sook-hee then suddenly remembers where she is, and abruptly pulls away, retreating back into the isolated bubble despite Hideko’s protests. The intrusion of a man into their previously private setting has thrown off the carefully mirrored, equanimous balance between them, and both women seem at a loss of how to recover it. This balance, indeed, seems shattered for good when Sook-hee walks in on Fujiwara and Hideko kissing. However, with just under two hours of the film left to go, it’s safe to say it’s not going to be that simple.

The following night, Sook-hee, hurt and angry, expresses a private determination to go through with her plan like nothing happened, and “most importantly, forget about Hideko.” She does her best to ignore the increasingly frantic ringing of the service bell when Hideko tries to summon her, but eventually caves. Hideko chastises her for her absence and not helping her undress after a poetry recitation, then instructs Sook-hee to sleep by her side, so that she’ll be close by if Hideko has a nightmare.

Sook-hee reluctantly complies, and they lie in bed back to back, silent until Hideko speaks up. She informs Sook-hee that Fujiwara has proposed, and intends to run away with her to Japan. Hideko further confides in Sook-hee that she is afraid of him, because she doesn’t know what to expect from him physically or sexually. In a series of gestures we later understand are deliberately calculated, Hideko draws Sook-hee back to her by asking Sook-hee to show her what her wedding night might be like, leading to the first actual sex scene of the film.

The scene (as before) is initially framed from Sook-hee’s point of view, and brings with it all the clumsy silliness of inexperience, despite all the crackling tension and jealousy that’s built up to this point. This framing of the scene, once again, felt like it ran contrary to critiques of male gaze. It leapt from trappings of steamily confined period dramas into a tenderly comedic space that I find hard to imagine would have been of interest to straight men.

We later learn that Hideko is deliberately borrowing strategies of seduction from the pornographic texts her uncle forces her to read. What follows doesn’t feel like porn though. It feels like two young women trying to express their own desires, with questionable success, through appropriating the tools of masculine gaze and power that have previously been used to harm them.

The Handmaiden being unafraid to turn masculine-centered lesbian porn on its head rang true with something meaningful, at least for me. It was also refreshing that it acknowledged the fact that sex can be (and is) bizarre and messy and even funny, especially the first few times you do it. Perhaps more importantly still, it completely ignored an ugly habit in “erotic thrillers” in which it’s the queer sex that is somehow dangerous or sinister. The things that go “wrong” in this sex scene are the product of inexperience or an exposure to other people’s ideas of what sex between women “should” look like, and nothing else. Insert sigh of relief here.

The following day, Hideko and Sook-hee’s relationship has inescapably changed, yet Fujiwara’s understanding of the situation has not. He attempts to seduce Hideko during her painting lesson as Sook-hee looks on angrily. She ultimately refuses to budge when he tells her to leave. This refusal culminates in a confrontation between Fujiwara and Sook-hee in the woods at the edge of the property, where he sexually harasses her and threatens to expose her true identity to Hideko.

Although this scene was hard to watch, there was something bizarrely reassuring in it. While Sook-hee’s feelings for Hideko are unquestionably in the backdrop of the scene, the violence to which Sook-hee is subjected here has nothing to do with those feelings. More explicitly; she’s not being punished or “converted.” The violence is the peak of the ineffectuality of the masculine gaze intruding where it’s not welcome, not useful, and not accomplishing anything. The fear (the horror, if you will) of this scene is not one that relies on homophobic violence or bigotry to work. The queerness is not the problem. Sigh of relief number two.

Still, it’s enough to send Sook-hee retreating once again. The next scene, during which she’s massaging Hideko’s feet, is full of two different conversations, skating by each other and never quite meeting in the middle. Sook-hee chatters on about Hideko’s impending marriage to Fujiwara, and how Hideko is lucky that men both desire and can protect her. Hideko brushes past these insistences to tell Sook-hee that it would be wonderful if their relationship could continue and she could stay by Sook-hee’s side.

Although they are speaking the same language (they still interact in Korean) it’s as though they’re speaking to each other from different rooms. This is evident when Hideko suggests that she might be in love with someone other than Fujiwara, and Sook-hee doubles down and insists that Hideko accept him anyway. Ultimately, Hideko loses her temper, slapping Sook-hee and throwing her out of the room. In the immediate next scene, we learn that Hideko has accepted Fujiwara’s proposal, although only on the condition that Sook-hee accompany her to Japan as well.

Subsequently, Fujiwara and Uncle Kouzuki both take their temporary leave; Fujiwara to lay low nearby, and Uncle Kouzuki to visit Japan for a week. Kouzuki threatens Hideko, informing her that she has a “week of freedom” but that she should “remember the thing in the basement.” Having seen very little of this dynamic so far, the audience is more or less in the dark about what this means, but not for long. For now, the point is that the men are temporarily out of the picture, leaving us questioning what that will mean for the relationship between Hideko and Sook-hee.

The answer is both simple and complicated. We do see some carefully montaged shots of Hideko and Sook-hee fleeing the house, boarding a ship and then a train, and so on, favoring the assumption that the two women are running away together. This is soon turned around, though, when we realize this is the intended flight for Hideko and Fujiwara’s wedding. The journey and ceremony both transpire with Sook-hee close by Hideko’s side, in her expected role as personal maid, and once again the women are clearly stifled. This stifling comes by secrecy and the intrusion of men, rather than by explicitly coded homophobic bigotry.

Unquestionably, this pulls at your heart strings, leaving you wondering how they’re possibly going to get out of this one. Of course, with about an hour and a half left of the movie, it’s safe to say there’s quite a distance to go before those answers are provided. Sook-hee is now relegated back to the position of outsider, trying and failing to sleep in an adjacent room during the wedding night, where she sings to herself in an effort to drown out the sounds of what she thinks must be Hideko and Fujiwara sleeping together. As we learn in the film’s third and final act, though, no such event has happened. Hideko has simply masturbated in front of Fujiwara, then cut her hand to spread blood on the sheets, in an effort to make it look as though the marriage was successfully consummated.

Of course, most people with vaginas can probably tell you the “blood on the sheets” thing is (more often than not) a myth. While I can’t speak to how much the scriptwriters on this movie know or don’t, I think it’s relatively safe to assume they’re in a similar boat. Thus, Hideko’s exercise of sexuality is again tied to how she tries to gain control over her own sexual identity by manipulating externally imposed, masculine expectations of how it’s “supposed” to look.

Meanwhile, it’s soon enough revealed that Hideko and Sook-hee have still been sneaking kisses when they’re not being observed. They are seemingly biding their time until they can escape from Fujiwara’s watchful eye for good. Unbeknownst to Hideko, though, Sook-hee still intends to go through with her plan with Fujiwara to have Hideko institutionalized and steal her fortune. Hereupon hinges Sook-hee’s visible ambivalence, torn between her desire and her ambition, and struggling as ever to navigate the intrusive presence of a man in the equation.

The plan seems to go ahead, and on the drive to the institution Hideko and Sook-hee exchange alternately pained and betrayed glances. At the last moment, Fujiwara and Hideko are shown to be a team, handing Sook-hee over to the hospital staff instead. Sook-hee is visibly confused, angered, and hurt, insisting that they have the wrong person, but her objections are dismissed as the product of a delusion, and she is taken away.

Cue the second act of the film, which I’ll try not to be as exhaustive about summarising. The second act just presents the events of the first act, but this time from Hideko’s point of view. This is, perhaps, the hardest stretch of the movie to watch. It reveals the specifics of the both physical and sexual abuse Hideko has suffered at the hands of Uncle Kouzuki since she was a young child.

Again, this is the entry point for a lot of the horror elements of the film. However, just like the sexual harassment exercised against Sook-hee, the horror doesn’t come from homophobic bigotry. It comes from the violence of the male gaze, and a condemnation of truly dangerous, violent sexuality rooted in control, power, and exploitation. Thus, it stands in direct and deliberate contrast to the tender, honest sexual intimacy between Sook-hee and Hideko that has been and is repeatedly depicted as liberating and healing between balanced, mirrored equals.

We also meet Hideko’s aunt through flashbacks, and learn the true circumstances of her death. Contrary to Hideko’s belief that her aunt committed suicide, we learn that she, too, was subjected to abuse and ultimately killed. Her death was framed to appear as a suicide instead. Moving back and forth between these two women, and the violence inflicted upon them, we learn that Hideko’s carefully scripted behaviors are in many ways a replication of exactly what her uncle has taught her.

She is dismissive toward servants even as a young girl, slapping them for perceived slights or insults. This is because of the role she is expected to perform, and because she has no other tools through which to communicate or circumvent her trauma. She is (initially) manipulative toward Sook-hee, observing Sook-hee’s reactions with a calculated detachment, because it’s what she knows. It’s only as the two women’s intimacy begins to grow in earnest that Hideko stops repeating the lines she’s been force-fed, but rather, little by little, she starts finding ways to use them for herself, to express more honest iterations of her desires and feelings.

As difficult to stomach as all these sequences were, they felt valuable, too. Valuable in their commentary not just about navigating and surviving abuse trauma, but also about navigating the particular violence of having your sexuality scripted for you by men, for men. The Handmaiden draws a direct line between Hideko being restricted and trapped by masculine expectation as couched in masculine-centered pornography, and her dissecting that pornography to try and understand what she can use and discard to express her desire and love for Sook-hee. This isn’t an accident. It brings a 2010s awareness of the porn industry, and specifically of lesbian porn “categories,” into a cultural and historical context where queer sexuality, if it was talked about at all, was alternately criminalized or medically essentialized.

Over the course of this second act, we also learn how Fujiwara and Hideko came to build their plan to enlist, and then betray, Sook-hee. Initially, Fujiwara promises to “save” her from her uncle by marrying her. However, he then threatens her with a continuation of the cycle of abuse being inflicted on another young girl if Hideko does not marry when she objects. It is this latter approach that wears Hideko down, or seems to.

Together, they plan to have Hideko’s current maid, Keiko, fired so that she can be replaced with Sook-hee, and the plan from there should unfold as we’ve seen in the first act. Incidentally, this stage of the plan leads to the only explicit sex scene in The Handmaiden that felt truly callous and exploitative, and it was a straight one. I dare say it’s fairly safe to assume that was deliberate, too.

We see the rest of the plan unfold in montages and abridged versions of earlier scenes. This is the case until, when Sook-hee cups Hideko’s face and comforts her about her mother’s death, Hideko has the unspoken thought that is perhaps the most pivotal in the whole movie’s thesis: “Is it like that in the books?” In one line, The Handmaiden’s central argument is brought home, resting on the narrative line drawn between what Hideko has been coerced to read and perform by and for men, and her attempts to navigate through and around it to express and experience more honest intimacy with a woman.

The film then jumps to another flashback of Hideko performing her readings, but this time, she is reading a text about two women having sex. A power outage ensues, but Hideko closes her eyes in the dark and continues reading, making it clear that she has memorized this particular text. Without needing to spell it out, this scene confirms that what Hideko knows of intimacy, desire, and sex between women has been framed by pornographic literature written for men. It echoes back the contemporary awareness of misinformation spread about lesbian sex through modern-day porn.

More than that, though, it also makes sense of the dependence on scissoring in the subsequent sex scene between Hideko and Sook-hee, which we previously saw from Sook-hee’s point of view. At least for me, this scene then felt less like it was catering to the male gaze. Instead, it felt more as though it was deliberately exposing the ways that the male gaze and its expression through pornography can be misleading and confusing for women first exploring their sexuality together.

Hideko and Sook-hee haven’t yet realized that we as queer women don’t have a prescribed set of sex acts, and that male porn directors (or male porn writers, in this case) have very little clue of what it actually looks like when we sleep together. Even then, though, their sex is awkward and clumsy, full of talking and laughter. For all the things they get wrong, for all the things they do that are following scripts foisted on them by other people, they still read as two believable human beings stumbling through trying to be close.

One scene leads to the next, and it is finally revealed that Hideko and Sook-hee have confessed their plans to each other, unveiling the ways in which Fujiwara sought to manipulate them both and set them against each other. Unbeknownst to him, then, they form a new pact between themselves, orchestrated to remove Fujiwara from the picture and strike out on their own. The earlier scene, then, when Sook-hee is taken into the hospital is revealed to be acting on both their parts, and the only person truly in the dark is Fujiwara.

Before reaching that point, though, this newly-forged allegiance leads to Hideko finally confiding in Sook-hee about the trauma she has been wrestling with for years. Sook-hee responds by beginning to destroy Uncle Kouzuki’s library, and, after an agonizingly long moment of frozen, terrified inertia, Hideko joins her, bringing the thread of liberation from smothering trauma through feminine, and specifically queer, feminine, intimacy to its apex.

Finally, Sook-hee is able to escape the hospital with the help of her mother’s hairpin-turned-lockpick, along with her adoptive family starting a fire in the hospital as a distraction. At the same time Hideko drugs Fujiwara unconscious with morphine and flees. The two women reunite, free and on a truly equal footing, unencumbered by the stifling of “proper” dress or the coercive scripts of male expectation.

They escape together at long last, while Fujiwara and Uncle Kouzuki are left to wither into irrelevance in the manor’s basement. Once a site of gendered and colonial violence, it is now where Kouzuki and Fujiwara die, with nary a finger lifted by Hideko or Sook-hee. These two men have no role at all in their future selves’ lives, and simply aren’t worth the time and effort.

The Handmaiden closes out with Hideko and Sook-hee sailing away to Shanghai, and in their cabin on the boat they engage in the final sex scene of the film. The scene, as before, is a giggling, perfectly mirrored and balanced, organic and tender but clumsy and new thing, both steering away from and reclaiming the violence that has been inflicted upon them. Roll credits.

In the wake of The Handmaiden’s release, it certainly provoked a lot of conversation. As I’ve touched on above, much of this discussion revolved around whether the film fell into troubling reliance on the male gaze. I confess, I was wary of this too, and was greatly relieved to find I didn’t feel that way at all upon watching the movie itself.

In doing my research and thinking in preparation for this article, though, I also realized the only people I’d ever heard talking about The Handmaiden were white Westerners. Many of them were men. Some of them were white lesbians or white bisexual women; more were white women more broadly. I thought: now, hang on. There has to be a more comprehensive, contextually-aware perspective on this.

Enter the GayV Club podcast, who succinctly and effectively addressed a lot of the questions and concerns I had seen thrown around time and again about The Handmaiden from the perspective of queer, feminine Asian critics. Finally. There’s a whole other article to write here about the fact that white voices talking about gaze and eroticism in this movie were upheld so much that I stumbled on the GayV Club purely by chance. For now, I’ll just say: Can we let someone who actually knows what’s going on here talk?

In that spirit, I want to defer to Deah and Merryanna here, and amplify their points. I’m not going to expand on them much; they should, and do, speak for themselves. The Handmaiden has two sex scenes between Hideko and Sook-hee. Just two, one of which is presented in two “halves” if you will, depicting each woman’s point of view.

There’s no question that the male gaze does permeate this movie, in terms of posing the external threat to these women and their relationship. In that sense, it is presented with an unflinching, unequivocal critical and even condemning lens, painted as something that is explicitly and irredeemably violent. I’m very much in agreement with the GayV Club here. While a movie claiming to include something in order to criticize it can often just end up reinforcing it; The Handmaiden is, to me, one of the few movies that actually does this right.

What’s important to note, as Deah and Merryanna point out, is that The Handmaiden deliberately and explicitly sketches out the difference between the male gaze and the lesbian gaze. It’s about the violence of the male gaze and the patterns of exploitative thinking that come with it, seen through sequences where “a group of men hurt and sexually abuse Hideko without even touching her.” The intent behind those scenes is obvious. It’s to expose the violence of the male gaze even in the absence of touching, because of the coercive and performative element, and the fact that Hideko’s sexuality is being exploited for male pleasure and male profit at the cost of her own individual expression and consent.

These story beats come up over and over again, and yet, as the GayV Club so succinctly points out, “for some reason, when Hideko who has been subjected to all of this violence, is alone in her bedroom with Sook-hee, acting out her own sexual desires, not those of men, people find that male-gaze-y.” Further still, as this podcast explains, these criticisms often fall directly into the trap of leaning into hyper-sexualized, exoticizing constructions of lesbians and bisexual women of color. They often expose more than anything an inability of white audiences to separate Asian women from (you guessed it) pornography that centers men, and specifically white men. Expressing these ideas under the pretext of “noble concern” for the actors and characters in these scenes is, simply put, the opposite of helpful, even as it can be and often is couched in good intentions..

From a white Western perspective, then, what jumped out at me was the number of articles or podcast episodes I came across applauding The Handmaiden for how it handled choreographing, rehearsing, and filming its sex scenes. Articles and reviews by white film critics, several of whom were men or straight feminists, would often do this. They did so even during some bizarre logical leap, where in the same breath they voiced concerns about male gaze.

Park Chan-wook encouraged the actors to become close friends before filming even started. The sex scenes were heavily discussed with the actors in pre-production, during storyboarding, and were choreographed and rehearsed while the actors were fully clothed so there would be no surprises. On the day of filming sex scenes, only female staff were allowed on the closed set. The scenes were filmed using a remote controlled camera, all male crew members had the day off, and Park Chan-wook was in another room. The only people in the room were the two actors, and a female gaffer. Sex scenes were filmed quickly, with only one or two takes for each shot, and then moved on from.

Okay. So what? The Handmaiden worked in the spirit of guidelines that weren’t even released yet for “intimacy on set” that have been under development for the past six years, pursuant to the work of Intimacy Coordinator and Movement Director Ita O’Brien. These guidelines, first made concrete in 2017, ought to feel like, and, indeed, be, common practice. They were instead likened to censorship as recently as the 2018 BAFTA red carpet.

The fact that The Handmaiden’s crew had the common sense to close the set and protect the comfort and informed consent of the actors without needing industry-wide guidelines or best practices to hold their hands shouldn’t feel special. Were these filming choices a fairly direct response to the toxic, exploitative environment on the set of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, released just three years before? Probably! It’s almost like Park Chan-wook saw what not to do, and figured it out. Western critics applauding The Handmaiden’s crew for having some human decency is more of an indictment of our own poisonous film sets than it is any kind of clever comment on Park Chan-wook’s directorial process. Get a move on. Jesus.

One more thing. I know I just brought up Blue Is the Warmest Colour; it’s hard to talk about respectful filming and directing of sex scenes between women without bringing it up. This does, however, bring into sharp relief another trend I saw over and over again while researching for this article. To be clear, I don’t have a problem with comparing movies to each other. There’s circumstances where it’s useful, even beneficial.

I don’t think this is one of them. Whether The Handmaiden is labelled as a LGBTQ+ movie, a psychological thriller, or an erotic thriller, we don’t have to look far at all before someone’s using those labels to translate The Handmaiden to themselves through likening it to white cinema, about white lesbians. “Oh, it’s a heist movie, it’s like Bound! Oh, it’s an erotic thriller with queer women, it’s like Basic Instinct! Oh, the women cross and double-cross each other and everyone else, it’s like Mulholland Drive!”

Seriously, knock it off. We shouldn’t need to find white lesbian analogues for this movie to make it about us so we can “understand.” Get over yourself, stop talking, and watch the movie. Try and remember it’s not about us this time. For those of you who’ve gotten the message, go watch The Handmaiden. For those of you who’ve watched it already — and can stomach a second viewing of the violence — go watch it again.