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MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL THE HANDMAIDEN
August 5 & 8, 9pm, Comedy Theatre
Following his neglected American debut Stoker, Park Chan-wook returns home for his latest Gothic melodrama, relocating the plot of Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith from 19th-century England to Korea under Japanese rule.
Several years after the tragic death of their little girl, a dollmaker and his wife welcome a nun and several orphan girls into their home, soon becoming the target of his possessed creation, Annabelle.
A decade after An Inconvenient Truth brought climate change into the heart of popular culture comes the follow-up that shows just how close we are to a real energy revolution.
A twist on the slasher genre following two death-obsessed teenage girls who use their online show about real-life tragedies to send their small mid-western town into a frenzy.
A woman is hired as a handmaiden to a Japanese heiress, but secretly she is involved in a plot to defraud her.
The heroine (Kim Tae-ri) is a pickpocket who joins the household of a Japanese heiress (Kim Min-hee) at the urging of a fortune hunter (Ha Jung-woo).
But his plan goes astray when maid and mistress fall into bed together – and that's just the start of a very twisted story that combines forbidden romance with madness, suicide, voyeurism and sado-masochism, not to mention an octopus who serves as a reminder of a notorious scene in Park's Oldboy.
In his usual over-the-top manner, Park leaps back and forth in time, dwells voluptuously on period clothes and furnishings, and builds to moments of visual and narrative excess: an early point-of-view shot from between a character's legs is a small indication of what's to come.
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