![]() It is a classic tale of crime, sex, ambition and love. The exquisitely beautiful Kim Min-hee is excellent as the heiress with all her gamine innocence, petulance and entitlement, and Kim Tae-ri is superb as the handmaiden herself: smart, worldly, talented in the ways of deceit and yet with an unsuspected streak of romance. But things go terribly wrong, and there is an unforgettable whiplash plot twist which sends us all the way back to the beginning of the story. The plan is that she will assist his sinister plan to seduce this heiress, elope with her and then have her incarcerated in a lunatic asylum – in return for which the “handmaiden” is promised a few jewels. In Japanese-ruled colonial Korea of the 1930s, a con-man posing as a nobleman persuades a pickpocket of his lowlife acquaintance to get a job as a handmaiden to a beautiful, wealthy young woman, who is being exploited by her hideous old father. It is a film to compare with Hitchcock’s Rebecca or Nagisa Oshima’s In The Realm of the Senses. Park Chan-wook, a veteran of extreme cinema with his “Vengeance” trilogy (Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) in 2016 created a glorious erotic suspense thriller in The Handmaiden, a sumptuously designed period drama based on Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith. Veteran player Song Kang-ho – who has become the face of Korean cinema - projects such pathos and even gentleness in his muddle-headed need to do the right thing by his family. The film has a crazy and exuberant theatricality, with broad streaks of farce, and also a strong if unexpected element of sympathy. As such, we’ve put together a lineup of upcoming Korean movies that are confirmed to be released in Fall and Winter 2020. ![]() Parasite is about the perennial topic of class and 21st-century servitude, and it is about the fundamental issue of inequality. Road to Kingdom is a competition in which seven of the South Korean boy groups compete in a comeback battle, where they will all release a new single on the same day to compete on music charts. Summer blockbuster season in Korea may have ended, but the second half of the year is just as packed with many Korean movies set to be released. Cunningly, he gets his elder sister in as an “art tutor” to the kid brother of this wealthy household, and it isn’t long before mum and dad have scammed jobs there also as chauffeur and housekeeper, all pretending to be not related, brilliantly playing on their rich employers’ smugness, fastidiousness and cocooned naivety. The teenage son flukes a plum job as an after-school tutor to a teenage girl who lives in a colossal modernist mansion. Bong Joon-ho’s upstairs-downstairs satirical masterpiece Parasite, the Palme D’Or and best picture Oscar-winner features a low-achieving family living cheek-by-jowl in a scuzzy, stinky basement flat.
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