After winning a major prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, “Oldboy” cemented Park’s international reputation as well as his fixation with spectacles of bloody and convoluted revenge (see also “Sympathy for Mr.
That scene was a nutty, showboating gesture in a movie with an abundance of outré gore and flashy style, if not much more on its mind than a desire to hammer its audience into submission. There comes a point in “The Handmaiden,” a tantalizing triple-decker entertainment from the South Korean director Park Chan-wook, when a book of lurid Japanese erotica opens up to reveal a drawing of an octopus wrapping its tentacles around a woman’s nude body.Ĭonsider this your trigger warning, in light of recent election-season headlines, though Asian cinema aficionados will rightly interpret this image, plus a later shot of a giant octopus in a tank, as sly references to Park’s most famous movie, “Oldboy” (2004), in which the actor Choi Min-sik famously gobbled down a live cephalopod on camera.
