Is it weird to admit I saw The Handmaiden on the day Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election? In order to take my mind off what I now call the Beginning of the End, I went to see the new thriller from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook that all my (male) critic buddies were raving about. I can’t help but think Park saw Bound one night and decided to make the sumptuous, period-piece version of that. Park took the plot from Sarah Waters’ 2002 Victorian-era novel Fingersmith and dropped it in Japanese-occupied Korea, where an heiress (Kim Min-hee) and her maid (Kim Tae-ri) work up a plan to escape the clutches of the despicable, twisted men in their lives. They also work up a sweat during a torrid, exquisitely shot love scene that puts the graphic sapphic sex in Blue Is the Warmest Color look tame. Sex stuff aside, The Handmaiden will satisfy you simply for its story of smart women breaking away from dick-swinging monsters — something I wished had happened for real the day I first saw it.
8 p.m. at the Belcourt
2102 Belcourt Ave.
