Films › Screenwriting
The Handmaiden
Directed by Park Chan-wook, 2016
Park Chan-wook and Chung Seo-kyung restructured Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith into three overlapping parts, each retelling earlier scenes from a different character's vantage point. This is not simple repetition; each pass reveals a manipulation invisible in the previous telling, so the audience's understanding of who is conning whom keeps inverting. Study how the screenplay plants small physical details in part one, a bell, a bath, a particular room, that only become legible as clues once part two recontextualizes them. The structure rewards a script built like a mechanism, where every scene is doing double duty as both immediate drama and future payoff. Dialogue is spare and often deceptive on a first viewing, since characters are performing roles for each other that the audience does not yet know are performances. The film also uses its structure to shift genre gears, moving from gothic thriller to heist to romance without the transitions feeling arbitrary, because each part is tied to a specific character's knowledge.
What to watch for
Track how a single prop or gesture means something different in each of the three parts.
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