The Handmaiden (2016)
Where’s it on? Film4, Friday, 11.15pm
With the film world firmly in the throes of Parasite fever, there are plenty of places online to double down on your fix of South Korean genre cinema. You’ll find Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) streaming on both BFI Player and Netflix, the latter also having Okja (2017). Mubi, meanwhile, is serving up both The Host (2006) and Mother (2009). Yet no subscription service currently has that other huge Korean hit of recent years – and the biggest subtitled film at the UK box office in 2017: Park Chan-wook’s headily perfumed erotic thriller The Handmaiden. For those who’ve not seen it, that makes Film4’s late-night Valentine’s Day airing all but unmissable. Transposing the story of Sarah Waters’ bestseller Fingersmith from Victorian Britain to Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century, it finds the Oldboy director at the peak of his visual and storytelling powers, ravishing our senses as we enjoy each delicious twist of the plot.
Immoral Tales (1973)
Where’s it on? BFI Player
For even racier Valentine’s Day content, the unshockable could try Walerian Borowczyk’s transgressive anthology Immoral Tales – now added for BFI Player subscribers. A sensation upon release in 1973, when it scandalised audiences at the London Film Festival, it tells four separate stories of sexual taboo-breaking over the centuries. This involves dropping in on such historical figures as Lucrezia Borgia, as she indulges her incestuous lust, and Elizabeth Báthory, as she slaughters local virgins in order to bathe in their blood. Borowczyk’s title seems to counter Eric Rohmer’s then recently completed series of Six Moral Tales, and Rohmer regular Fabrice Luchini is in here too, though the French New Wave director never had the actor getting head on a beach as the waves roll in. This is one of those 1970s titles perched precariously on the borderlines between arthouse and pornography, but that’s visually as remarkable as anything by Pasolini.
Ready or Not (2019)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
Going by the name Radio Silence, directing duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett have earned a swathe of genre fans for their nifty, unpretentious horror fare – including their contributions to fright anthologies V/H/S (2012) and Southbound (2015). Their latest, which debuts on Blu-ray this week, should appeal to anyone who got a kick out of the game-playing antics of Game Night (2018) or the riotous neo-Cluedo pleasures of Knives Out (2019). Samara Weaver plays the bride marrying into a board-game dynasty who discovers her new in-laws have some unusual initiation rites. Unfolding overnight in a dark mansion, with eccentric turns from the likes of Andie MacDowell and Henry Czerny as the bizarro relatives, Ready or Not is a giddily entertaining bout of feature-length hide and seek – like Get Out (2017) by way of The Addams Family.
Fail-Safe (1964)
Where’s it on? Blu-ray
That strangely common phenomenon where two close-to-identical film projects on the same theme arrive in cinemas at around the same time saw one of its most famous clashes in 1964, when Stanley Kubrick and Sidney Lumet both raced to release their respective countdown-to-nuclear-Armageddon movies. Posterity has made Kubrick the winner, with his inspired decision to spin the subject matter as black comedy in Dr. Strangelove. But if you’ve never seen Lumet’s Fail-Safe, it’s electrifying to see similar material played straight down the line for white-knuckle suspense. Henry Fonda is the US president who is forced to own up to the Soviet premier that a technical snafu has initiated an American bombing mission over Moscow, one that proves unrecallable after the plane passes the ‘fail-safe’ position. Although both films came out of Columbia Pictures, legal wrangles from the Kubrick camp caused delays to Fail-Safe’s release that arguably stymied its subsequent reputation. The new Criterion Blu-ray may help redress some of the balance.
The Lady without Camelias (1953)
Where’s it on? Amazon Prime
A welcome addition for deep divers on Amazon Prime this week is Michelangelo Antonioni’s early film The Lady without Camelias. Made a full decade before Fellini’s 8½, this was Antonioni’s own movie about movie-making, a kind of Star Is Born story in which Lucia Bosè’s young starlet becomes an overnight sensation but soon finds herself stuck working in sexy melodramas and in a tepid marriage to her director. This was still the era of neorealism, which – as one character says of Italy’s postwar trend for street-level authenticity – has made everywhere a possible film set. Antonioni takes that idea to its logical extreme by asserting that a film set can be a film set too, mapping out a hectic, behind-the-scenes world in long, flowing camera movements that evoke the industry in fascinating detail.
