At first, it looks as though we’re in for an intimate little chamber piece about a demure handmaiden, her wealthy young Japanese mistress and the latter’s suitor, a handsome nobleman who teaches her how to draw and paint. A passionate love triangle develops between them; Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) and Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) are engaged to marry, yet a frisson of sexual chemistry grows between the wealthy woman and her maid, Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri). Like all great thrillers, The Handmaiden’s various turns are surprising yet entirely logical in retrospect; and just when we think we have a handle on where things are going, the story takes a lurching fall down a mineshaft into some very dark continents of human appetite. In some respects, The Handmaiden makes David Fincher’s Gone Girl look like an episode of Scooby Doo; it’s the kind of subversive, full-blooded and straight-up saucy kind of thing that Paul Verhoeven would appreciate. The effect is vaguely akin to a gothic novel like Wuthering Heights in its story of repressed desires and secret obsessions, albeit laced with explicit sex scenes and the odd dab of violence that would have left the Bronte sisters blushing into their handkerchiefs. At first, it isn’t obvious where Park’s heady concoction is taking us, but – without giving too much away – The Handmaiden gradually reveals itself as pointed (and blackly funny) parable about the repression of female sexuality. The Handmaiden’s a tough film to pick apart because a) there’s so little to criticise and b) it’s too easy to spoil everything that’s brilliant about it. The third section has some magnificent pay-offs and, in the final scene, a plot point that might just sum up the meaning of the whole film: an object of punishment becomes a symbol of sexual liberation. A feminist thriller akin to the Wachowskis’ Unbound or artful exploitation? We’d go for the former. The antithesis of an empty-calorie flick like Fifty Shades, The Handmaiden is a magnificent, even flawless piece of cinema. The Handmaiden is out in UK cinemas on the 14th April.