Ah, Adam, THE HANDMAIDEN? Genevieve, you too? Oi oi oi.
Honest question - what do you make of a film that is all about the power of suggestion that repeatedly shows you all of the sexual pleasure that the male characters yearn to view? Park seems to think that he can be morally superior to these males who exploit the women in their desire for sex, yet we are constantly barraged with images that those men so strongly want to see but never attain. How are we any better to be privy to the visual stimulation that the other men are not? I found this film to be completely ethically contradictory.
It's also nearly unadaptable as presented - even if these scenes were described luridly in the novel, a novel is still left up for the imagination. The acts that these women perform are only doled out to us in detail in the form of spoken word. So the better adaptation would be the one that elides the visual component of erotica, firmly giving back the control of female sexuality to the privacy of the female characters than the audience.
Thoughts, Adam?