Sook-Hee is a resourceful girl approached by the self-proclaimed Count Fujiwara, a shady Japanese swindler who pretends to be high-born by frequenting high society circles, to propose a deal.

The girl must find employment at the house of the young and wealthy heiress Hideko, who, after losing both parents, lives in her uncle's house, a hardened bibliophile and avid collector of erotic books.

Fujiwara plans to marry the young heiress, acquire her fortune, and declare her insane with Sook-Hee's help; Sook-Hee must win the girl's favor, becoming her lady-in-waiting and confidante.

Essentially, the girl's task will be to convince Hideko to marry Fujiwara, thus allowing him to lay his hands on Hideko's substantial fortune.

However, a morbid attraction arises between the two women, which descends into unrestrained eroticism.

The girl is hesitant to betray her mistress and lover, but Fujiwara's pressures prevail, and the marriage will be celebrated in great secrecy.

From this point on, however, repeated plot twists will overturn the plans of those who plotted in the shadows, and nothing will ever be the same.

Purity.

An almost abstract concept, an aesthetic ideal to strive for endlessly, a moral and aesthetic reform of one's Self to which artists of all eras have submitted with creative fervor and dogmatic devotion.

Park Chan Wook, a refined aesthete of a now-lost generation, embraces and transfuses this Liturgy of Purity into his eleventh film, a work that strikingly did not find distribution in Italy, known by its English title The Handmaiden, or by its Cannes title Mademoiselle, or more simply by its Korean version Ah-ga-ssi.

This film is effectively the first work after Park's sole Hollywood experience in 2013 with Stoker, a film produced by Twentieth Century Fox with stars of Nicole Kidman's caliber, which evidently did not satisfy the restless Korean artist, who for Ah-ga-ssi preferred to return to an entirely Korean cast and production.

Adapted from a novel by Sarah Waters titled “Fingersmith” (in Italy titled “Ladra” and published by Ponte alle Grazie), which the trusted screenwriter Seo-kyeong Jeong adapted from Victorian London of 1862 to 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, deriving a credible, original, and fascinating script.

Shot with sublime mastery, this film astonishes with its sophistication and depth.

Some scenes are memorable, one in particular being Hideko's public reading of an erotic story before an exclusively male audience gathered by her uncle, a lewd yet refined satyr.

The audience listens captivated by the girl's sensual performance, as she acts with her body, gripping her snow-white neck with her hands while with a garrulous, choked voice she declaims a scene of extreme sex that seems taken from a passage by De Sade.

The men swallow, petrified, as the reader pierces them with her gaze and the throbs of her theatricality.

A Park Chan Wook you don't expect, a great master of jade and porcelain iconography, a polished and perfect image whose two great champions in Asian cinema are precisely Park and Kim Ki Duk, both Korean, testifying to the great cultural ferment pervading this small nation.

But there is not only form in Park's cinema.

In his works, a constant subterranean vibration is felt, which traverses the entire narrative like a sound wave.

A kind of powerful submerged message that slowly but inexorably surfaces with insolent solemnity.

To penetrate the meaning of The Handmaiden essentially means engaging as spectators, peeling this metaphorical onion to grasp its intimate core.

Of course, we (indeed, no one can) will not tell you what it is.