The Handmaiden 2016
The pick, at No. 24. Park Chan-wook's 2016 thriller, co-written with Chung Seo-kyung, adapting Sarah Waters's 2002 novel Fingersmith but moving it from Victorian England to Korea under 1930s Japanese colonial rule. A Korean conman and an orphaned pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri, in her feature debut) plot to swindle a Japanese heiress, Hideko (Kim Min-hee); the con keeps turning over across three acts told from shifting perspectives. Sean and Amanda say they went back and forth with Oldboy before landing here, calling it the culmination of Park's craft, an erotic thriller of a kind the U.S. abandoned, and probably his best. Much of the talk is the exploitation-vs.-liberation debate over the sex scenes, which they argue are earned by the character's porn-saturated upbringing and by the film's ending, where the two women escape the men entirely.
